CALL ME SNAKE

I didn’t figure the kid could go the distance. I guessed he’d only last one lecture at the most. And I ran into his dad, the mathematician, at the conference today and found out I was right. He only made it  through one lecture (45 minutes of dense, abstruse math) and then had to get out of there.

Not that I don’t sympathize with the kid. I sat through a lecture today given by a man considered perhaps the most brilliant physicist in the world. He was trying hard to make his talk on gauge theory understandable to everybody. Well almost everybody. I was trying hard to follow him but only got about half of it. Of course, not getting the other half was almost equivalent to getting nothing. A physicist afterwards asked me if  there were any new developments reported in the talk–any progress toward solving an important mathematical problem. I did not think so but told him he might want to check with somebody who had a clue as to what was said.