(no subject)

[randomness]

And the answer to "What do you have to do to get tenure around here?" was answered in the obituary columns over the weekend: be Benoît Mandlebrot and wait twelve years.

My favorite quote was at the close:

“If you take the beginning and the end, I have had a conventional career,” he said, referring to his prestigious appointments in Paris and at Yale. “But it was not a straight line between the beginning and the end. It was a very crooked line.”

Comments

[ceo]

gosling's father, a physicist originally from the UK, worked with Benoît Mandelbrot at IBM Watson Labs for many years. They went through the process of getting their US citizenship at around the same time, and Peter delighted in passing along Mandelbrot's story of his oral exam: the examiner asked him how many stripes were on the US flag, and Mandelbrot answered "Six. Or seven, depending how you look at it". Which apparently did not amuse the examiner, but he got his US citizenship anyway.