O O Ø O O O O
Quals
If I have to stare at it, you do too.
Lately, I have been embroiled in the midst of the dreaded Ph.D. Qualifying Exams — Quals for short.
If you’ve never met someone who has suffered through them, quals are a rite of passage that go something like this:
- Don’t leave the house for a month
- Forego all contact with those you used to call friends or family
- Gradually, lose the ability to communicate with the outside world as a whole, in preparation for your life as an academic.
During your quals, your world is reduced to a desk and a stack of books. You are a castaway in an island of meaningless prose. So, like any good castaway, you stop shaving, you start mumbling, and you befriend whatever inanimate objects are at hand.
For me, the only objects at hand have been books, and so, for the past month, books have been my friends. I’ve talked with them. I’ve slept with them. I’ve stroked their covers when I thought they weren’t looking. In return, all I asked was that they treat me well, and occasionally give up a nugget of knowledge.
It came as quite a shock when one day, one of my little friends wound up and socked me in the proverbial kisser. He said this:
That got my attention. Snapped me clean out of my metaphor, in fact. This wasn’t my friend, it was a book, written by a pair of authors, Hoffman and Kunze, and those authors were insulting me. Me! Their loyal reader! In no uncertain (mathematical) terms, they were telling me:
We are smart. You are not, lest you would not be questioning us. If you do not understand what we have just written, then it is you who has the problem. Come back when you’re more mathematically mature.
Or in short:
Don’t be so fucking stupid.
I was shocked. I was dumbfounded. But, I was desperate, so I kept reading. Then, a few pages later, they did it again, this time saying:
For those of you who live in the real world, this is the mathematical equivalent of asking your reader: Which is bigger, red or blue? It is saying:
No, we’re not rambling. It is you who fails to grasp the subtlety we’re trying to highlight. If you thought you understood after the first sentence, and wondered why we rambled for another eight sentences, then the subtlety is lost on you. Go back to your cave, neanderthal.
Or in short,
Don’t be so fucking stupid.
So, should I be insulted? Should I get angry when I read this thinly veiled contempt for me, the reader? Or am I really too thick to grasp the mathematical subtleties that they authors are oh-so-clearly presenting?
I think it is the latter. Because when I stare at equations like these,
I don’t see clarity. I see a whole lot of letters that look almost the same. I see a lunatic that chooses, out of all the letters and symbols in all the alphabets in all the world, the Greek Alpha (&alpha) and and italicized A (a) to represent two totally different and totally unrelated variables. Those choices can’t possibly cause confusion, can they?
And when I’m asked to refer to, say, “Example 11,” I don’t immediately think to look after “Equation (4-18)” and before “Theorem 10”:
In fact, after a few hours of staring at mathematical gibberish, It occurs to me that I can barely see the equation numbers at all, which is strange, given that they are set in exactly the same font as the rest of the text, and aligned nicely with everything else on the page. I mean, you wouldn’t want to make them stand out or anything:
And, if at this point, the typographic subtlety of my argument is lost on the authors, allow me to make it perfectly clear. It’s not my comprehension that is at fault. It is your presentation.
Or in short,
Don’t be so fucking stupid.
Now if you will excuse me, I have more inanimate objects to befriend.
Kjell Wooding
Tuesday, December 7, 2004
PD DCLXXXI