I just got a message from my colleagues at NYU mentioning that some undergraduates have done well in a certain math contest. Their names are Ruihan Yang, Fangyuan Liu, Chang Li, Ximing Cheng, Suru A, Wentao Zo, Dong Hyun Kim, Priyesh Chakraborty, Tianrui Xu, Shibei Guo, Jaewoo Chang, Ritvik Joshi, Jiadai Xia, Zhihao Tang, Yunji Wu, Aiwen Xu, Siqing Zhang, Zian Chen, Junlin He, Yucheng Wang, Zhijian Yang, Yi Yin, Zijia Lu, Yue Ying Zhang, Junlin Liu, Ziyi Tang, Shiyu Zhang, Pengcheng Han, Weiyi Lu, and Zhengxu L.

[12 April 2017]

Here in Washington Square Village I’m rereading Washington Square and am reminded of how wonderful Henry James is. Such perfect and perfectly hilarious use of words! Of course, some things he writes are explicitly funny, but the most exquisite are those that one could not say are funny outright and yet are, in some deeper sense, hilarious. This is exactly what Bach does to me. Nobody could accuse the cantatas or the Brandenburgs of being strings of one-liners… why do they bring such smiles of amusement?

I think the secret is the same in both cases: mastery. Bach and James are so utterly in control of their crafts that we sit back and enjoy. Our inner laughter is a response to their strength.

[19 September 2015]

I have long had a theory about the Beatles and Bob Dylan. I know their songs intimately, every note, every cough, every crackle. My theory is, I know the recordings better than they do. Paul McCartney has played Yesterday thousands of times, no two of them identical. What chance has he got against me with the thousands of times I’ve heard the 1965 version?

Today I had the chance to be McCartney. I had a fine afternoon working with my new student Abi Gopal, who seems to have read all my works and knows them backwards. Toward the end of the day I proposed that we try a certain trick adapted from my AAA approximation paper of a couple of years ago. He agreed that this was a good idea, and then gently showed me that I hadn’t remembered the algorithm right.

[10 March 2018]