Shriram KrishnamurthiThe systems group decided to welcome @tonofcrates to the Brown CS department by filling his office with a … ton of crates. Way to get him, Carolyn and Justus!
I Can't Believe It's Not Zero!@shriramk @tonofcrates slightly disappointed that none appear to be the largest package you can send via USPS: http://www.tombanchoff.com/uploads/1/0/6/8/10686625/831471_orig.gif
@steve @tonofcrates I think Will should be honored enough to even be mentioned in the same *thread* as Tom Banchoff.
WTF is going on with Tom there?!?
@shriramk @tonofcrates Freshman year in the first week of multivariate calculus, Tom asked us to describe the maximum-volume package that could be sent via USPS. @ahl actually constructed it (and mailed it to him, IIRC).
Tom was, of course, _delighted_.
@steve @tonofcrates @ahl So that WAS Adam! I was thinking, "Man, that looks like Adam, but what do I know."
Adam Leventhal@steve @shriramk @tonofcrates that photo was taken on film (!!) and the Internet still never forgets! Amazingly, I didn’t recognize how my ma35 classmates would regard this as shameless brown-nosing. However that lone act convinced Tom of not only my own mathematical prowess but also of my brother’s.
I’ve use it as an example of first-impressions with teachers and professors… as my own son enters his sophomore year focused on math and CS
@ahl @shriramk @tonofcrates I dunno, I thought it was pretty cool.
Tom, like a lot of profs, may be a little too susceptible to being swayed by stuff like this. If you pulled off one good stunt you could mostly coast through the rest of a course. (Pretty sure Nicos gave me an A in ma113 [now 1630] just for figuring out a very fiddly proof that stumped him one day in class, because the rest of my work was pretty so-so.)
@steve @ahl @tonofcrates What I'm hearing from all this is that Brown has not been sending its best into the great big world.
@shriramk @ahl @tonofcrates a bunch of our classmates in ma35 turned out ok, they weren’t all slackers like me and Adam
Mason PorterPerhaps the challenge is to solve the packing problem with a better algorithm?
@masonporter His handle is basically a "jobs for the boys" scheme for people like you.
@shriramk "for people like me"?
What does that mean? Taking those words on their own, it comes across very poorly, to be frank, though I have no reason to expect that you would mean it that way.
Exactly what type of person am I?
P.S. I also don't know what a ' "jobs for the boys" scheme' is.
@masonporter Sorry, I was trying (and failing) to make a joke about it being a great source of work for very smart mathematicians (bin-packing problems, that sort of thing). Clearly didn't come out that way at all. Apologies.
It's fine. I grew up in the era of e-mail flame wars and learned the lesson that text can appear rather different from what we mean. (I sometimes forget that lesson, to be clear, but I try to keep it in mind.)