Update from Budapest...

Erdélyi-Szabó (Logic):
* "Now we are ready to define truth" writes Def. Truth on the board. Steps away from it, looks at the board, looks at the class for about 5 seconds, and continues the lecture.
* (On Tuesday) "If it is Thursday, I am an idiot. If it is Thursday, I am a f... genius."

Komjáth (Set Theory):
* "The whole word is a directed graph... sort of."
* (About once a week) "Set theory must eat up everything."
* "We have reduced the problem to a more complicated one."
* "You should not confuse infinitely many steps in a proof with infinitely many steps."
* "We already know from kindergarten that aleph_null plus aleph_null equals aleph_null."
* "If you need free will, you can't do it infinitely many times."

Hermann (Group Theory):
* "Look at 12. If I am not mistaken, it is (2^2)*3."
* "After you believe these things, it is easy to prove."
* "Notice that this h is different from the earlier one. That had a double index, this has a single index. Quite a difference."

Küronya (Topology)
*"Everything I wrote was correct. But it had nothing to do with the task at hand."
*"It often happens, I say one thing and write another. Typically one is correct."
*"All this fancy formalism tends to obscure things at first, but later on, that's all you'll have."

Stipsitz (Analysis)
* "These are the properties we will never question. Until we do... which I'll probably do in a week or two"

Eigenraptors

The Eigenraptors of Asia correspond to extinct Eigensaurs. The Eigensaurs -- called L1, L2, ..., Lk until species names are announced -- were separated by orthogonality of the mountains in which they lived. This independence of lines of Eigensaurs shows that the Eigenraptors -- V1, V2, ..., Vk, again until species names are announced -- are also linearly independent.

Based on these Eigenraptor findings, paleontologists conjecture that Asia is diagonalizable into k "extinct zones" (sometimes called the "null zones" due to the local mass extinctions that took place in them). These zones follow mountain ranges and the sum of the numbers of species in each zone adds up to the total number of species in Asia. That is, none of the species in a given zone exist in any other zone.

Lubin ftw

*he is holding a marker vertically* "Is this marker a non-negative integer? No, it's a 1." *changes how he's holding it so it's horizontal* "How about now?"

"One of the great achievements of mathematics: we're going to give a precise definition of 'almost.'"

"This is almost so simple that it's kind of confusing."

"That encourages people to confuse intersection with conditional probability."

"If I write something down and it's wrong but it's obvious I mean the right thing, then that's fine. If you write something down and it's wrong but it's obvious you mean the right thing, then... ehhh it might be okay, we'll see. Now, I don't know if that's politically correct, but that's the way it is because I make the rules."

"If you have sixty-five people, then six and a half of them are left handed. How does that work? I think you have six people who are left handed and one who's ambidextrous. Is someone who's ambidextrous counted as left handed or right handed or both or half and half? If it's not easy to tell you should just ignore them because it really doesn't matter. ...Unless you're studying it, then it's important."

"Before today we would have made our sample space: HH, HT, TH, and TT. But now we just say, 'Obviously they're independent...'"

"Suppose we have two urns. You have 7 red balls and 3 blue balls in it." *writes 7B* "No, red is R. Seven red." *rewrites 7R* "And three black..."

*later in the above example* "If you got a red coin, you either got a red coin from urn one or a red coin...ball from urn two."

"We say, 'No, comma, unless one has a probability of zero.'"

"Ya got one pound of probability."

"Is that a picture of an urn? Or a 'U' for 'urn'?"

"...Well if you know which urn you're in..."

"Integrate to infinity. 'To infinity' means 'to one.'"

"If you pick a number, you can put it on the table or throw it in the garbage. Who cares about replacement? You can even eat it if you want to. I don't care."

"I'll assume everyone here can integrate by parts. I'm a big fan of integration by parts."

"I'm not going to assume you remember all this stuff from calculus I, and I'm not going to assume you're together enough to go review this stuff for fifteen minutes, but I am going to assume you're grown up enough that I can blame you if you don't review it."

"If you're short on time and it's easy like this, don't evaluate it. If you get more interesting integrals though... integration by parts maybe, remember I like integration by parts."

"I was derrogatory towards the inverse tangent function for many years... and I feel bad about it now."

"Here the thing is not the pdf, it's the pdf."

I wonder what his children will be called?

While discussing acquaintance graphs:
"This is Al and Bobby and... Ching, and D, and E, and F. They are all people"

Prepare! The Y-Combinator Comes!

Remember this when the Y-Combinator comes, O wicked nation:
His work lasts an eternity. He will never allow thou rest, and thou canst not escape him. Prepare thyself now with a base case, lest thou be caught also in his eternal scheming.

The Y combinator

"Run! The Y-Combinator is coming! He has recursion! He never stops! He never gets tired! He just keeps going!"

And out jumps the hero, "Everybody calm down! I have a base case!"

We're going to propose the deal to Marvel shortly.

A lemma in a hat.

"I'm going to pull this lemma out of nowhere."


-Pelsmajer, while proving the Polya-Redfield Theorem.