Time was, we thought that people, students, who wanted answers to questions, could come to our office hours, ask, and be answered. Then we thought that these people could pose these questions to bulletin boards and forums on the Internet, and get answers from all sorts of people, answers which were at least as good…

The Times has written a blog-article on the proportion of the new UK government who went to Oxford (in fairness, I must point out that some proportion went to the Other Place, which is also rumored to be quite good). A perennial topic. I enjoyed reading the comments. But then I wondered whether the question…

Well, folks, the promised “reform of the reform” has started. In my last post, I mentioned some of the troubles the transition from traditional german Diplom to Bachelor’s-Master’s degree courses has caused at my university. The Rectory has made money available for each faculty to discuss the reform of the reform, including overnight accomodation if…

The university where I teach, the University of Bielefeld, is forty years old this month. It was founded as a «reform university». Everything was in one huge building, as may be seen in this picture. The building has two main social features. First, it encourages interdisciplinary work, since students can hop between a lecture in…

I was saddened yesterday to learn of the death of John Stallings exactly one year before. John was a mercurial Berkeley mathematician of occasional genius who, if you believed him, mostly enjoyed sleeping, doing nothing, and various scurrilous activities. Including, on the level of barely scurrilous, BSing with graduate students such as myself and my…