[lbo-talk] Cornell rebrands

[ravi]

At around 22/4/06 9:19 pm, Jerry Monaco wrote:
> Cornell will always remain essential to the palace of my imagination
> because of Nabokov's "Pale Fire".
> 
> But let me say something for the aggressive inferiority complex of the
> U. of Chicago, circa 1976, when I arrived their as a boy just turned 17,
> from a small town, shocked by this place where every professor seemed to
> live completely inside of his (sometimes her) head.  The quantity of
> quasi-autistic 19 year old genius mathematicians was alone enough to
> frighten a poor kid who (mistakenly) thought he was smart, not to
> mention the crazy right-wing economists who for some reason seemed to
> congregate around the Law School, and Paul Ricouer who would walk around
> campus muttering to himself in French before he went to lecture at the
> Divinity School - and why the Divinity school for Zeus's sake? - and the
> damn physicists in the courses I took who expected me to know all they
> knew from the second session onward ...
>

Chandrasekhar (of namesake Limit fame, and nephew of the earlier Indian
Nobel Laureate C.V.Raman) taught at the University of Chicago. He went
to college in Madras with one of my uncles, at Presidency college. Did
you take any coursework under him? The story goes that Einstein and
others spent quite a bit of effort trying to get him to move to
Princeton but he chickened out at the last minute due to his comfort
with U Chicago.

Carnap was at U Chicago too, though probably before you were born ;-).

If I could have studied anywhere, I would choose UC Berkeley, I think.
>From BSD to Feyerabend... that would have been an experience! Or perhaps
U of Minnesota!

(I guess a more obvious one would be IAS/Princeton in the Einstein-Gödel
period... von who?? ;-)).

	--ravi

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