Mason Haberle



Quotes of Maciej Zworski

Recorded during Spring 2021 Math 222B (Partial Differential Equations) and Math 279 (Random Perturbations of Non-Self-Adjoint Operators)

1/19/21:

"This is... to use the F-word... fundamental, in this subject."

"This is the problem with doing computations in real time. It's like watching baseball."

1/26/21:

"That's a good point. Oh, goodness... sorry. Ah sh*t!"

1/28/21:

"By the way, am I almost out of time?"
Student: "Yes, you have negative 1 minute."
"Ah. May I have positive 2 minutes?"

"This measure is like the office upstairs in a Kafka novel."

2/2/21:

"You know, somebody could say maybe only finite sets exist, in any case. Let's face it."

2/16/21:

"Matrices are zeroth order differential operators with constant coefficients, but I still don't think I can get away with calling this a PDE course."

2/18/21:

"Spectral theory is trivial, and should not be taught."

2/23/21:

"PDEs do exist, you know..."

"By... Taking... Subsequences. See? That's BTS."

2/25/21:

"I noticed you were amused by me using BTS last time. So I looked it up on google. And I suppose I found out that you are a K-pop fan."

3/2/21:

"For any q, this blows up. ...Okay, well, really any q bigger than 0, in case you get some Bourbakis to look at these slides."

"Yes, exactly. We want to know if the converse is true. I can see you've been studying logic."

"We're just physicists, so we don't care at all about domains or such silly business." - After 2 lectures spent exclusively discussing domains.

3/9/21:

"Who played Nash in that movie? V, you must know, you're the BTS expert."

4/1/21:

"It's not a set, it's a category. That's a set of points with multiplicities."

4/6/21:

"You're really easy to bamboozle, Y" - After claiming 5/6 is between 3/2 and 2

4/13/21:

"Who the f-triple-star is Jackson Pollack?"

"This is not an art class!"

"I have a graduate student, and I'm not going to throw him under the bus. Very smart guy. But 6 months ago, I asked him to complete some squares, and every week he has another excuse as to why he hasn't completed the squares."

"This little factor right here has caused an untold amount of grief to generations of asymptotic analysts."

"Showing o(h), that's a dinner in a 1-star restaurant. Showing O(h^infinity), that's a dinner in a 2-star restaurant. Showing it's actually an eigenfunction is a dinner at a 3-star restaurant. That's the reward for these problems."

"So and so proved that 1-star restaurant implies 3-star restaurant, but I couldn't give him any dinners for that proof."

"Terry Tao put on his blog that if someone solved, this, he wouldn't be buying them dinner, but he would fly them down all expenses paid to sunny LA."

"I don't recommend you try to solve this - not because I don't want to spend money on a fancy dinner for you, but because I have no idea how to direct you."

4/22/21:

"I guess this is proof by intimidation. I don't want to just intimidate you into believing this here."

"Sky...scraper...sheaves.... Ooh, skyscraper sheaves on nLab! What the hell is nLab?"

"Sorry, I'm just reading about sheaves now. Maybe I should not spend the office hours... uhh... uhmmm..." Gets lost in reading again