From: ara@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Allan Adler)
Newsgroups: sci.math
Subject: Office Hours
Date: 12 Nov 92 09:08:07 GMT
Article-I.D.: camelot.ARA.92Nov12040807
Distribution: sci
Organization: M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab.


I am currently enjoying the hospitality of a university in a part
of Rhode Island famous for its beaches. The chairman is a nice guy
who has shown great understanding, compassion and patience in dealing
with the problems of people in the department, as far as they are
known to me, and he has treated me very well also. In particular,
I have been given an office, a library card, a computer account 
on a UNIX system, xeroxing priveleges and a mailbox in the department. 

I am  aware that they are 
giving me their best. The library is not great but as libraries that are not 
great go, it is not so bad. The computing center has been unwilling to
install useful free software on the machine, but at least it has emacs
and also ftp and telnet so that I can log into machines elsewhere that are
better equipped.

I can't say I like living in Rhode Island much. Public transportation
stinks, the electricity is unreliable and has already damaged some electrnical
equipment in my apartment and there have been frequent recent reports of
contamination of local water supplies by fecal coliform bacteria. The most 
recent place that this has happened is at the university itself.

One of my persistent complaints about the department is that no one is
interested in talking to me about mathematics that I find interesting.
My interests, broad as I like to think they are, are essentially disjoint from 
those of the department. No one responds well to my attempts to talk to them
about mathematics, although some people have expressed an intersst in 
getting me to work on their favorite problems. In the entire time I have been
here, I have never seen or heard anyone discussing mathematics informally for
the fun of it. Last year, I tried to generate interst in an informal set of
lectures I wanted to give, just so I would have someone to listen to me while 
I learned certain things. The response was so unenthusiastic that I 
decided not to go ahead with it. However, a funny thing happened:
I was approached by the people in charge of the various seminars and colloquia
and asked if I would like to give talks in them. The part that was
funny was that none of the people who approached me in this way had 
any interest in talking to me themselves. On the other hand, it is
my perception and belief that people attend seminars and colloquia as a matter
of social discipline and not out of any interst in the topics being
presented. So I summarize being invited to give talks as follows:
someone who doesn't want to talk to me wants me to prepare and deliver
a lecture to a group of people who also are not interested in what I have
to say. I see it as social discipline for its own sake.

Recently, I decided I would give the department one last chance to see
if I could find people to talk to informally about math. I dittoed a notice
that I put in all the faculty and grad student mailboxes explaining
the extreme isolation I feel in this place and making two offers:
(1) I announced that I was establishing office hours MWF 2-3, that I was
    available by email, etc. and that everyone was invited to come and talk
    to me about any of a certain long list of topics that are absent from or
    neglected in the department. These included: abstract algebra, algebraic
    geometry, algebraic topology, category theory, number theory,
    automorphic forms, Lie groups and Lie algebras, history of math,
    history of science, theta functions, mathematical logic and set theory.
    I said I was willing to start on square zero.
(2) I announced that if there was some subject that anyone wanted to learn
    and which they could not learn in this department, they could come to me
    and I would help them select reading materials and help them with 
    difficulties they might have reading them.

At the same time, I explained that in order to avoid misunderstandings,
I felt I should clarify what I was not offering, namely:
(i)  I was not offering to lecture in seminars and colloquia
(ii) I was not offering to discuss specialties already well represented in the 
     department
(iii) I was not offering to duplicate work that someone was already getting
      paid to do. (Since I have no income, I am rather sensitive about
      this).
(iv) I was not offering to work on anyone's research.

The topics and the offering are broad enough, I think, that even these
restrictions still leave plenty of room and that no one would imagine I
am simply trying to get people to work on my research. Very simply, I am 
offering the people in the department a chance to change and I think
the department is badly in need of that. They would never have hired
someone like me because it would have been their professional duty to
hire someone with a definable specialty narrowly within the interests
of the department. Therefore, the fact that I walked in off the street 
seeking logistical supports for my research presents the department
with a novel opportunity to learn new things and it is wasting that 
opportunity.

After spending several one hour periods in my office waiting for someone 
to show up (including several people who
said they would like to learn these things and would definitely stop by), I
am getting pretty frustrated. I know I could remedy the 
isolation by shelving my own interests and joining one of the working
seminars in the department, but I am determined not to do that.

I feel that the lack of response to my announcement of office hours
tends to support what I said earlier about the seminars and other
activities in the department being social discipline for their own sake:
I have presented everyone with an opportunity to get the same 
information under voluntary conditions and there is no response.
But it is also possible that there is something sociological or anthropological
going on here. It might be that going to someone's office to discuss
matheamtics has a social significance that I am not aware of. For example,
what if everyone is socially conditioned so that any activity that doesn't
involve the group as a whole is taboo unless explicitly sanctioned?
Or maybe mathematicians are conditioned to be unable to distinguish
between their social lives and their professional lives and since I
don't socialize with mathematicians (as a matter of preference)  I
can't talk to them about math either.

The chairman has listened with extraordinary patience to my complaints
about isolation here but has nothing to suggest.

I really don't know what to do and I would welcome suggestions.

Allan Adler
ara@altdorf.ai.mit.edu