Dressing to Impress Mathematicians
February 15th, 2008 by WaltBrad de Long, an economist, has a post up about the significance of how he dresses for specific audiences. In particular, the consequences of wearing ties:
With math-oriented students, however, a tie tells them that I spend too little time thinking about isomorphisms.
(This inspired n-category jokes in the comments.)
February 16th, 2008 at 10:31 am
Bob Dylan, in a radio interview, said “I’m a mathematical singer. I use words the way most people use numbers.”
I wear a good suit whenever I present a paper or chair sessions at international conferences. I wear at least a necktie and gold-plated space-shuttle tieclip when wandering a university Math department (such as my alma mater Caltech) as it sharply distinguishes me from slackers and grad students. It gives the impression that I actually get paid a lot of money from my Math, which does not hold up to more rigorous analysis.
But I can’t help but think of what Allen Ginsburg told me:
“wearing a suit and tie is the most subversive way for a poet or a scientist to dress.” He and I were friends, corresponded on 19th and 10th century Chinese peotry, argued about Artificial Intelligence from a Tibetan Buddhist perspective, and did a number of public appearences together.
Allen Ginsberg, Master Poet of Beat Generation, Dies at 70
By WILBORN HAMPTON
The New York Times
April 6, 1997
… After leaving Columbia, Mr. Ginsberg first went to work for a Madison Avenue advertising agency. After five years, he once recalled, he found himself taking part in a consumer-research project trying to determine whether Americans preferred the word ‘’sparkling” or ”glamorous” to describe ideal teeth. ”We already knew people associate diamonds with ’sparkling’ and furs with ‘glamorous,’ ” he said. ”We spent $150,000 to learn most people didn’t want furry teeth.”
The poet said he decided to give up the corporate world ”when my shrink asked me what would make me happy.” He hung his gray flannel suit in the closet and went to San Francisco with six months of unemployment insurance in his pocket. San Francisco was then the center of considerable literary energy. He took a room around the corner from City Lights, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s bookstore and underground publishing house, and began to write.
During this period, Mr. Ginsberg also became part of the San Francisco literary circle that included Kenneth Rexroth — an author, critic and painter — Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan and Philip Lamantia. He also met Peter Orlovsky, who would be his companion for the next 30 years.
His first major work from San Francisco was ”Howl!”…
In 1985, Harper & Row published Mr. Ginsberg’s ”Collected Poems,” an anthology of his work in one volume that firmly established the poet in the mainstream of American literature. The poet again made tours, showing up on television shows, but this time he was in suit and tie offering a sort of explanation of his work.
”People ask me if I’ve gone respectable now,” he said to one interviewer. ”I tell them I’ve always been respectable.”…
But despite his suit and tie, the censors continued to look over Mr. Ginsberg’s shoulder….
[JVP: Ginsburg, when asked, insisted that America's most influential poet was no Bob Dylan, with whom he travled on the Rolling Thunder Tour. I agree. I think that Bob Dylan should win a Nobel Prize in Literature. But not a Fields Medal]
February 16th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
On the subject of coats and ties…
There must be a knot in the Rolfsen table that mathematicians could incorporate into a uniform of the guild…
Replacing the standard Windsor with 9-13, for example, would obviously increase esprit de corps among mathematicians, like a club tie, and even more so, since anyone can buy a club tie, but only a mathematician could weave 9-13 decorously under his or her collar.
February 16th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Of course, some Mathematicians wear a String tie, which is knotted in a Calabi-Yau space of 10 or 11 dimensions. Unfortunately, the extra dimensions are compactified on a length scale too small for people to see. And the string-tying has not yet yielded any testable predictions.
My good friend Jeremy Colton emailed me to say:
“At Webster, there was actually a rule that the instructor HAD to remove his jacket, if he was wearing one, and undo the top button of his shirt”
February 16th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Jacob, not even a mathematician could put a knot into his tie. The very fact that a knot can be tied means that it can be untied, and thus is unknotted.
February 17th, 2008 at 8:14 am
John: If you follow this link, you can see that at least one forward-thinking mathematician has already abandoned ordinary ties, with their conventional Windsor knots, in favor of Knot 9-13.
It’s true that the tie in the picture is a clip-on, but we’re talking about mathematicians here, not Wall Street lawyers.
February 17th, 2008 at 10:20 am
/me rolls his eyes
Bad form to photoshop, and worse to pick such a luminary as your raw material.
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:45 pm
John: Any reasonable “luminary” would be flattered to appear as a paradigm of the New Mathematical Elegance.
I was working on a Klein-bottle hat for you, but I couldn’t find a picture.