When I visited Japan as a tourist in 1979, I asked him in advance to write me a generic letter of recommendation. It was full-page, handwritten. It opened every door that needed opening. He was also nice enough to exaggerated the importance of my thesis when talking about it with my parents. ;)

He told me once that as a teenager he pursued both math and piano. When he had to pick one, he obviously picked math.

His wife becoming a significant politician surprised me. I just recall her bringing sushi she'd presumably made to a math department party at Harvard. She seemed perfectly nice, but didn't talk much. I don't know how good her English was or wasn't at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdymgQmdK_A

I never use hyphens where em dashes would be correct.

I do have issues determining when a two-word phrase should or shouldn't be hyphenated. It surely doesn't help that I grew up in a bilingual English/German household, so that my first instinct is often to reject either option, and fully concatenate the two words instead.

(Whether that last comma is appropriate opens a whole other set of punctuation issues ... and yes, I do tend to deliberately misuse ellipses for effect.)

Once I started self-publishing in the 1990s, I disregarded her opinion.

But I was offered an assistant professorship at the Kellogg School of Business at age 21, and have often wondered whether I should perhaps have taken that, or else the research position I was offered at RAND.

I was in the relevant department at the time (Harvard math), but I wasn't much of an algebraic geometer, so I took that at face value without probing for details.

I confirmed that from my own memory via a Google AI summary, quoted verbatim above. Of course, I would never have learned it in the first place had somebody not written it down.

In fact, relational databases did nothing in the 1970s. They didn't even exist yet in commercial form.

My first prediction as an analyst from 1982 onwards was that "index-based" DBMS would take over from linked-list DBMS and flat files. (That was meant to cover both inverted-list and relational systems; I expected inverted-list DBMS to outperform relational ones for longer than they did.)

I just recall the (non-mathematical) poem about the haircut.

Certainly that section generally comes more to mind these days in the age of LLMs ..

https://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/CrookedHouse.pdf

The last one has the hero and heroine recruiting the spirit of Lobachevsky to help them recover their daughter from non-Euclidean hell.

---------------

Three jolly sailors from Blandon-on-Tyne

Went to sea in a bottle by Klein

They found the view exceedingly dull

For the sea was entirely contained in the hull.

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There was a young lady named Bright

Who traveled much faster than light

She departed one day

In a relative way

And returned the previous night.

-------------

There once was a fencer named Fisk

Whose movements were agile and brisk

So quick was his action

The Lorentz contraction

Diminished his sword to a disk.

--------------

(There's also a bawdy version of that somewhere, referring to a different "sword".)

Where I'm more on the fence are about works that rely strongly on mathematical physics, like Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, or the parts of Pohl's Gateway series that most explicitly refer to black holes. I'd still say those are not "mathematical fiction", but at least it's close.

And at least one of the recommended works -- The Devil and Simon Flagg -- is anthologize there.

What is mean is that by the time NewTool that fills a gap doing X really well catches up with the YZ that older tools have long experience handling, EvenNewerTool handles E better than NewTool does.

I don't have any knowledge of the specifics here, but at first guess I doubt something security-focused would be an exception to that rule.

What's purple and commutes?

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.

.

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An Abelian grape

Without her, I am nothing.

ME - SHE = 0

ME = SHE

M = SH

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You can probably guess the next line if and only if you can guess the university.