OT: Serendipity Again! How I Became A Tar Heel - Best Dook! Beat Dook!
It was really just by accident <Wink!> that I went to Chapel Hill, North Carolina for graduate studies in mathematics, with the goal of getting my Ph.D. I had been taking mathematics courses at the State University of New York at Albany, SUNYA, known as the “Poor Man’s Princeton” <I ended up with 70 credits in mathematics out of a total of 120 credits; SUNYA was very progressive and had done away with college requirements: only remaining requirements: 48 credits in your major, and 30 credits in your minor. Remaining courses whatever you like. So I took philosophy, starting with junior level courses (I had read some Kant in high school) in epistemology and metaphysics, and Logic, but got disheartened because although many interesting questions are formed, no answers are ever offered. And then switched back to mathematics, my first love as a child. Here I found that “God had written the answers in the Book”, as the mathematician Paul Erdos used to say.
Proofs from THE BOOK is a book of mathematical proofs by Martin Aigner and Günter M. Ziegler. The book is dedicated to the mathematician Paul Erdos, who often referred to "The Book" in which God keeps the most elegant proof of each mathematical theorem. During a lecture in 1985, Erdos said, "You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book."
I became friends with two quite excellent mathematicians who had a profound influence on me:
Ted Turner, a Differential Topologist who got his Ph.D. at UCLA: a person who studies the bizarre shapes and twists and turns that can occur in higher dimensional smooth topological spaces; he taught me Topology, including Knot Theory, and Linear Algebra; I eventually applied to The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (the “Tar Heels”) with a pitch about doing research in differential topology.
Norm Winarsky, a Harmonic Analyst who had done both his Undergraduate and Graduate studies at The University of Chicago, but who became disheartened with the life as a college Professor because of the low salaries and ended up working for the RCA Sarnoff Research Labs. He taught me two semesters of Advanced Calculus, the nuts and bolts of differential topology, and then did an independent study with me on dong Calculus on smooth topological spaces (called”manifolds”): we had used Spivak’s excellent little paperback, “Calculus on Manifolds”, and excellent introduction to differential topology.
This all gave me an excellent preparation to study with Sheldon Newhouse at the University of Notth Carolina at Chapel Hill. They accepted me and offered me a Teaching Assistantship (I would teach a course in either Pre-Calculus or Calculus and they paid my tuition and rent and board, as well as some entertainment money. I also did some tutoring for the athletic department, trying to keep those football players eligible for the game, and other althletes as well. UNC believes in educating their athletes. The basketball players(I was there when Michael Jordan and the Tar Heels won the NCAA and the students literally <painted the Streets ‘Carolina Blue’>) had their own personal tutoring program which travelled with them around the country.
When they accepted me they thought I would fit well with Sheldon and he quickly accepted me as a doctoral candidate. I began attending a weekly Dynamical Systems Seminar, and went to some research conferences and went on to do a thesis under Dr. Newhouse in “ Entropy, Dimension and Chaos of Real and Complex Polynomial Dynamical Systems”. Like the Dead say, “What a long, strange trip it’s been!”
BTW, St. Paddy’s Day was always great fun! The Irish musicians would come down from the mountains to play Irish music at my local Irish pub, “Molly Maguire’s”.
Slainte!
Erin Go Bragh!
Proinseas
 |
