Yesterday I headed over to the Wexner Center to watch Harvey Friedman, world famous mathematician, give a talk. The Wexner (pictured left) is this artsy fartsy building that probably costs about 10% of the university budget and serves about .001% of the university students. Very novel architecture and so forth- excellent training grounds for parkour, but I digress.
Dr. Friedman (pictured) is one of the logicians in my department. See, when Glowing Face Man isn't busy rescuing princesses from pirates, he researches logic here at the university, so I'm intimately steeped in the logic department, hence my presence at this talk. Friedman was chosen as the distinguished lecturer to deliver this prestigious annual distinguished lecture. Let me say a few words about Dr. Friedman. This dude is in the world record books for being a professor at some ridiculously young age like nineteen. He's such a badass researcher there's literally a book called, "Harvey Friedman's Research on the Foundations of Mathematics", and it's no small book. And that's from 1985. Meanwhile he's been doing even more research since then so I guess if they updated this book it'd become more of an encyclopedia. Anyway, that's the kind of person I rub shoulders with in my everyday workday.It was a very wide audience, albeit still mostly old farts of academia, but from all sorts of departments, not just the hard sciences and mathematics. I took a seat near the front, and it turned out I was sitting with Dr. Friedman's wife and grandson. I wasn't able to strike up much conversation because a minute after I'd met them, the speech started.
Dr. Friedman was introduced by noone less than the university president. A man renowned for his silly bowtie; he was recently in the papers for meeting with Senator Sherrod Brown. The pair is doing what they can to lower tuition for students at Ohio State. Anyway, he was gushing with praise for Friedman. At this point, I was expecting the talk would be something of a substanceless inspirational talk about math, that Dr. Friedman would spare the actual math and give a "comfortable" layman's speech. Harvey surprised us all.
While his speech was much more elementary than, say, the 700 logic sequence, Mr. Friedman boldly began showing arcane logic formulas probably over the heads of 75% of the audience. Initially, I was cringing, thinking to myself: "He doesn't know his audience... this speech is too technical..." As it went on, though, I became aware of something. Whether or not Friedman's speech was comprehensible to everyone present, he chose a very good level of technicality, let me explain why.
If Dr. Friedman had given a broader, painless speech, it would have been an insult to the audience. The audience came full-well knowing Harvey was an eminent logician, and that his work is very deep. Whereas, the sort of substanceless speech he COULD have given, could have been given by ANYONE with a couple hours preparation time and access to Wikipedia.
Think of it this way. If you went back in time and went to an Albert Einstein lecture, which one would you want to go to? You'd go to the most famous and hardest one of them all, say, the one where he revealed his theory of relativity. Sure, maybe it'd be totally over your head. But how freakin badass would it be to have a picture of yourself with Einstein next to a board full of arcane equations. If it were me, I'd bring a bunch of hot chicks along and do a big photo shoot, have the girls all over Dr. E. while he does some poses. The point is, though, if Einstein saw me
there and gave me a generic substanceless peptalk about the philosophy of physics, I'd be let down. By giving a technical, painful talk, Dr. Friedman gave his audience the biggest compliment he possibly could, and it's a talk that (regardless how closely they followed) they'll long remember.After the talk, there was a fancy reception. And I mean, they didn't spare any expenses for this bigshot annual lecture. The food was ridiculously rich, the kind of stuff you'd eat if you were one of those big-steel tycoons from the late 1880's, monocle and all. You'd eat it while haggling a big trade deal with the foreign minister of China. The best food there, in my opinion, was this one where they rolled up some vegetable substance in rolls of bacon and stuck them on shish kebab sticks. They also had live music: three girls playing violin off in a corner.
There was also wine. I have been called "The Russian" for my ability to throw it back, and yesterday evening was no exception. After five or six glasses of wine, I took one of the shish kebab sticks, went to the violin players and assumed the role of conductor. The girls were eating it up. Well, I guess that's typical when I show girls my stick.
Here's a promise I'm gonna make to my readers. One of these days, you're gonna log onto glowingfaceman.com and see a new post and its title will read, "Delivering the OSU Distinguished Lecture". That's right, one of these days it's gonna be ME up there. I won't forget the lessons I learned yesterday from Dr. Friedman. People in the audience will tell their grandchildren about the speech I'll give. Mark my word.
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Meanwhile, while you're waiting for that, here are some posts that will thrill and excite.
The Joys of Change
Book Review: James Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji"
The Sound of your Native Tongue
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