What's the word on DA? Is she OK? I don't see her around here either.

There ought to be a name for social errors and retinences, which do us harm, that we commit because we're too respectful, or shy, or don't want to intrude.

I'm continually amazed at the offense people do not take, now that I've kicked it up a notch or two, having been reticent all my life. Rather the contrary. All my years of concern utterly wasted and misinterpreted, probably.

She was here last week I think, for a few comments.

I'm often the same way. I'm very interested in people, but not wanting to pry and letting them choose how their story should unfold. Recently I've started worrying a lot (mostly because of a comment someone made to me that I wasn't asking him enough questions about himself, although now that I think of it he's kind of an ass) about not asking people enough questions. I could try to ask more, but I really hate that moment when a question that someone doesn't want to answer gets asked.

The play sounds really irritating.

I usually don't volunteer information about myself unless people ask- I don't want to seem like I'm self-centered and talking about myself when I'm not sure people care. We'd better not go to a meetup together or we'll just sit there staring at each other.

I've got this problem a little -- I love listening to people talk about themselves, but I'm shy about prompting them, which occasionally makes me worry that I'm rambling on about myself to an annoying degree to keep the conversation going. The intitial questions you need to get someone started are so flat and bald sounding: "Where do you live" "What do you do". What I really want to ask is "You know you have some story or topic you want to talk about, everyone does. Start."

I've been on both ends -- reticent to sound like I'm prying on the one hand and disgruntled by the feeling that people who don't ask aren't interested on the other. My "solution" on the first end has lately been just to tack a disclaimer onto my intrusive prying questions that I apologize in advance if it's an obnoxious question. The proper balance really does seem hard to find -- and I'm glad to see I'm not the only one stumbling with it.

6 -- I used to have a friend who took a very similar approach. He'd ramble on about himself for awhile, then turn to me and say something like, "Your turn." His intent was probably similar to what you describe, but it always rubbed me wrong. Like, really, there's nothing about me you find interesting enough to ask a specific question? But then, I'm perhaps excessively needy about wanting regular validation that the story I want to tell is in fact of some interest to the person listening to it.

I've been on the other side -- I asked someone what I thought was an innocuous, friendly question and found that she was a war refugee who had experiences she did not want to talk about. She was very polite but it was clear that I had sent her someplace where she did not want to go.

I had sent her someplace where she did not want to go

You had her deported?

There are actually people and cultures where questioning is considered rude, even without of bad experiences like the one I just mentioned. I violate their rules often enough, for my own reasons, but it's sort of odd to me to see someone say that people should do this more.

I think, by and large, that people find it flattering when you ask them questions about themselves.

11- Must make for rough job interviews.

Woo! A topic where I get to say to the rest of you: you're totally overthinking this.

You need to understand one simple fact: in almost all cases, the people who are uncomfortable being asked questions and going on about themselves aren't that way because they don't want to talk about themselves, but because they're very sensitive to whether the person asking is genuinely curious and likely to be a sympathetic audience. So not asking questions, or giving up after one or two is the worst thing you can do. You'll only sound like you're "collecting" them if that's what you're doing--people can tell.

What to do: ask simple questions: "what do you do?" "have you always lived in 'current place'?" Almost always, the answers to these will open up new avenues for conversation "No, I used to live in Topeka, but I got this great job offer..." And then you can ask about the great job, about the differences between Topeka and the new place, what small-town America is like, etc. Sometimes an answer will have obvious relevance to something about you: "I used to live in a small town! etc." Be sure to share a little about yourself too, so it doesn't sound like an interview. After a few or sometimes several of these starter questions, the conversation will find its own topic and rhythm.

Just remember, the first few minutes of the conversation aren't where you're going to get wonderful flowing talk; it's where you establish to each other what kind of interlocutors you're going to be--don't be a dick and you won't seem like a dick.

Woo! A topic where I get to say to the rest of you: you're totally overthinking this.

Agree with that. Disagree with everything after it, though.

So you like swimming- do you ever meet any interesting people at the pool?

"Woo! A topic where I get to say to the rest of you: you're totally overthinking this."

Disagree with that. Agree with everything after it though.

da is about the place under a new name, and she has a new blog. Since ogged linked to it the other day, I don't think I'm being indiscreet.

Do you think we're welcome if we weren't told about the move, or should we take the hint?

Hmph. After I told everyone that "dagger aleph" was the coolest name ever.

I guess being associated with the Knights of Malta, the Mamluks, and the Bavarian Illuminati does not appeal to her.

Hm, does no one else here have a concept of "prying", or an awareness that people vary in how much they want to tell you? I guess I've spent too much time in the criminal underground and among (a mostly different group) foreigners.

What to do: ask simple questions: "what do you do?" "have you always lived in 'current place'?"

Of course. I'm talking more about people I know well. I already know what they do and stuff like that so you no longer have some of the easy "hooks" you do when you first meet someone. I'm talking more about, say, my friend from Lebanon. He surely has interesting stories about growing up there and I know I'd find them fascinating but I can't imagine ever being like "so! tell me about your childhood in Beirut!"

21: Of course we have a concept of 'prying' -- why do you think everyone is talking about being inhibited about asking questions?

20: "alif sikkiin" is in fact Arabic for "dagger aleph".

does no one else here have a concept of "prying",

Everyone here has the concept of prying, to an inhibiting degree.

Just don't sweat it and ask whatever you're curious about. Think about it. If someone asks you about a sensitive topic, it's pretty easy to dodge and redirect their question, isn't it? Just grant the person you're talking to the same ability to evade those topics they don't like, and stop trying to manipulate them and second-guess what they're sensitive about.

I'm talking more about, say, my friend from Lebanon. He surely has interesting stories about growing up there and I know I'd find them fascinating

Ooohhhhh. Well, that shit's none of your business unless he decides to tell you.

time in the criminal underground and among (a mostly different group) foreigners.

Criminals generally either have a cover story or send very clear "don't ask me" signals, don't they? As for foreigners--welcome to America, this is what assimilation feels like.

Sincere question:
Have any of you inhibited-types ever felt like, "This person is just curious about me in order to collect stories."

Like, if you're travelling abroad, and talking to a bunch of people who are curious about you? Do you really assign them jackhole ulterior motives? (Sincere until that last loaded sentence, I guess.)

I suspect I talk way too much about myself. Which stems, in part (I think), from the sort of impulse LB describes in 6 and makes me wonder if I am a bit like the person described in 8.

So, heebie-geebie, been doing much fornicating lately?

Yeah, but cover stories are pretty fragile and not always well-constructed. And not everyone in the criminal subculture is hard-core, but lots of people have things they'd rather not talk about. controling your reputation is a big deal.

The desire not to pry is what makes me want to ask the question in my 6. I don't want to ask anyone anything they don't want to talk about -- I just want to invite them to ramble on about whatever it is they do want to talk about. But I have a hard time issuing that invitation specificially without asking some initial nosy questions.

Twenny-four-sev, baby! How's the child-porn ring going?

I don't mind nosy questions. They keep me from just repeating the same old stories I tell out of habit, and make for a more interesting conversation.

28: In um, this country I spent almost six years in, I would often enough get a barrage of questions from someone I'd just met, which was fine, but it was also clear the interlocutor wasn't listening to any of the answers, often cutting me off part-way through even short answers in order to ask the next question.

So, not exactly "collecting stories", more just talking to a bignose to be talking to a bignose, I guess.

Don't mind nosy questions that are asked of me, of course. I still feel a bit awkward about asking other people.

People seem to be working with an unnecessarily static sense of reputation. What I think of someone might change from sentence to sentence--from "too nosy" to "interesting" to "boring," and so on--and I assume others are the same way. As HG said, I think there are usually clues available as to discomfort; as long as you pay attention to them, people are likely to consider you sufficiently polite.

I don't mind nosy questions. They keep me from just repeating the same old stories I tell out of habit, and make for a more interesting conversation.

I knew there had to be a trick to getting non-boring conversation out of you, Matt. Now if we could just get you to stop using that horrid faux-British accent.

The trick is to avoid being the person Motch describes in 34. Which is easy if you aren't too eager to demonstrate that you know the right questions to ask.

I met possibly the two most interesting people on earth while randomly walking the streets the weekend I was in Tallinn. One of them was - no joke - a gay Colombian linguist who was participating in a faculty exchange program between the universities of Bogota and Tartu. The other one was a Finnish anarchist who had just gotten back from visiting his girlfriend who was a Uighur living in Xinjiang. I never meet people like that in the US. ("people like that" possibly being defined as "people who tell outrageous lies to teenage tourists").

34 Fair enough, but that's still evidence that the questioner's true motives aren't too hard to glean. If they're respectfully curious, that comes through, and if they're an uninterested interruptasaurus, it'll show as well.

You just gotta know how to press my buttons the right way, M/tch.

horrid

Pwned.

Quit stereotyping Estonia, Ned. There are lots of boring people there.

Beebie, it's not worth it any more. A lot of the kids are hiring agents and asking for VIP suites and shit.

I mean Heebie.

Jeez, John, why you gotta be so TACTLESS?

The somewhat related problem that I have is that it's taken me years to realize that it isn't rude to ask people about what they study or what they do. Conversations with strangers about mathematics are almost invariably annoying for the mathematician and typically disasterous as conversations starters. So me and most mathematicians I know try our best to avoid these conversations and change the topic.

By analogy, I'd always assumed it was rude to ask a history graduate student what she was working on (even though I love history and would be fascinated to hear about it). But, it seems this isn't rude, and that people in other fields actually like to talk about what they study.

There's a bar in Portland OR (Goose Hollow Inn) where you're forbidden to ask anyone what they do for a living. The idea is to allow conversation outside the hierarchies.

I'd love to know your guess as to why the disjunction in experiences, and what it says about Mathematicians.

Oh, that makes perfect sense to me. Academic math is so far away from any math most people do that there's no sensible way to talk about it at all -- when I was a a physics major at MIT my math major roommate could lose me completely in half a sentence. Most other disciplines have much tighter links to something that gets taught in high school; for a historian, even if you can't get what's really interesting about your work across, you can at least talk about your broad subject matter and get comprehension.

Indeed, overthinking. If you're friends with someone, you share stories about your childhood when they're appropriate or germane to whatever it is. Similarly, it's perfectly okay to ask a friend what X was like, or whatever, when it's germane: you're talking about childhood experiences, or Beirut, for example. Jumping at *anyone* out of the blue with "so! What was it like growing up in Beirut/Omaha/San Francisco?!?" is going to make you seem like either a rube or a snob.

45 is cool. I try to stay away from that question, although of course you often end up falling back on it with people who just won't volunteer anything.

The problem is that the basic objects in mathematics aren't something ordinary people have intuitive relationships to.

I have an intuitive relationship with the concepts of "squid" or "19th century France," despite the fact that my knowledge of either is negligable from the perspective of an expert. Thus it's easier for me to at least understand what someone means when they explain what they are studying, and to be interested, and to ask interesting questions.

On the other hand, non-specialists do not have an intuitive relationship with the notion of a vector space, even though that's a much more basic concept to mathematics than a squid is to biology. Thus I can't even explain what I study in the broadest terms without being totally incomprehensible or condescending.

Once I was asked what I studied by an inorganic chemist (who do have an intuitive relationship with representations) and actually managed to have a brief but interesting conversation about what I studied which we both seemed to enjoy. So I think the problem isn't with me.

On the other hand, non-specialists do not have an intuitive relationship with the notion of a vector space, even though that's a much more basic concept to mathematics than a squid is to biology. Thus I can't even explain what I study in the broadest terms without being totally incomprehensible or condescending.

Hm, really? I mean, presumably most mathematicians teach, and you have to explain this stuff to students, right? Obviously interlocutors who aren't really interested will go "um, ok" and change the subject, but you never know--sometimes lay people really are interested in weird, boring subjects.

DA has a new name?

19: she told me she thought Ogged's link would bring people to her new location, so I'm pretty sure we're welcome.

...sometimes lay people really are interested in weird, boring subjects.
Nicely put, B.

53: So it might, but your link to it seems to be broken.

It's been my experience that philosophers also hate to be asked about their field.

let me try again, then.
http://alifsikkiin.wordpress.com./

Physicists must have it the worst of all. People can't understand a word they say and strangers want to ask them about string theory and quantum mechanics. I get enough questions about quantum mechanics and I don't even know any physics.

re: 56

I don't generally mind. But it often does lead to people getting all dismissive about philosophy, or retreading some hackneyed old crap they once heard about a philosopher/philosophical argument one time.

Then again, I work on fairly accessible stuff. Which makes it easier for me.

48 -- That sounds logical, but I'm still going to overthink it. How do you land on the topic of Beirut or childhood to begin with? My guess is probably by virtue of a series of tentative build-up questions testing the waters. You really want to ask about/talk about childhood experiences, so you launch in with some generic observation about some kid in a grocery store, your conversation partner takes the bait and remarks that he *never* would have gotten away with that as a kid (signalling the okay to make it more personal), then you plunge into your story about how you were beaten in a grocery store as a kid or asking about how kids behaved in grocery stores in 19x0s Beiruit.

I'm just inclined to think if you sit around waiting for childhood or Beirut to pop up in conversation before posing any questions, your friend who knows you know he grew up in Beirut is eventually going to wonder why you've never asked about that and perhaps assume it's because you're not interested. Assuming it's a friend rather than random stranger, I'd rather err on the side of rube and just ask if I'm interested.

Thus I can't even explain what I study in the broadest terms without being totally incomprehensible or condescending.

One of the best things I learned in grad school was how not to feel stupid for not knowing stuff I couldn't possibly already know. Maybe it wouldn't be very fun for a mathemathician to try to explain what he or she does, but I wouldn't feel condescended to. (Unless of course the mathematician sighed impatiently the whole time.)

59: Well, we all get that kind of crap. My favorite is the person on the airplane who says "ha ha, I better watch my grammar!" God, I'm so tired of that.

60: Well yeah, if you're so determined to find out something that you try to drive the conversation and bait people into giving you openings, you might as well out with it. I was thinking more along the lines of the way most friendships actually work.

my experience both with math and with hi-tek is if you ask a questions that you get a receding series of questions back: "OK, do you know what a zoozoo is? No? Well, a zoozoo is part of a wimwam. Do you know what a wimwam is? No? Well, a wimwam is part of a compiler. Do you know what a compiler is? Not really, but you've heard to word used? OK, a compiler....."

51: Math classes do not teach anything that is a topic of modern research until at least the second year of graduate school. A professor might try to explain informally and vaguely their general subject of study to a senior math major, but before that even vague explanations are hopeless.

What we teach in classes is material from hundreds of years ago. A freshman can understand math from the 1600s. A senior math major at a good school can understand most material from the 1800s.

If someone asked at a party "Oh, tell me something interesting about math that I probably don't know," I'd be able to have an interesting conversation. But it's not easy to segue into that from an inquiry about what you study. People feel condescended to if you won't actually tell them what you study.

62: I think "What's the most annoying thing people constantly say to you" would be a good topic. For mathematicians I think the dreaded "oh, I hated algebra" comes in second to "oh, you must be really smart."

51 understates the difficulty of talking about things that can only be understood at all by people who have spend at least a couple dozen hours in introductory classes.

I play college bowl and write college bowl questions sometimes, and math is by far the hardest thing to write about for someone outside the field. As soon as a question looks like a math question, I know, with 100% certainty, that there is no possible chance I will know the answer, even if there's a giveaway clue at the end. Even if the answer is something like "set" or "cross product".

For example, in this article I have no idea what the following phrases mean:
Lie algebras
Lie groups
Differentiable manifolds
Infinitesimal transformations
Vector space
Field
Binary operation
Bilinearity
∈
Rings
Algebras
Abelian
Trivially
Universal enveloping algebra
Differential topology
Smooth vector fields
Differential operator
Directional derivative
Diffeomorphisms
Left-invariant
Tangent space
Identity element
Rotation group
Homomorphic
F-linear map
Morphisms
Bijective
Isomorphism
Subalgebra
Supspace
Ideal
Quotient space
Kernels
Adjoint map
Cokernels
Connected
Universal cover
Exponential map
Homeomorphic
Neighborhood
Injective
Simply connected
Compact
Surjective
Classification
Representation
mod
Semisimple
Ado's theorem
Nilpotent
Engel's theorem
Killing form
Non-degenerate
Trace operator
Root systems
Category theory
Cyclic permutation
Braiding

It would take a while to build my knowledge up to the point where U:"PE,TGI"9 could convey any information to me at all. And I'm a person who understands everything on this site, for example. The impulse to completely avoid talking about things to a non-expert is pretty understandable.

A lot of the stuff by Martin Gardner and others in the Scientific American explains math in an interesting, non technical way. It's not impossible to do, but I think that it's farther removed from actual math than talking informally about history is from actually studying history. (Though historians have a lot of technical interest in sources, for example, that laypeople don't find especially gripping.)

Martin Gardner kicks ass.

horrid

Pwned.

Quite.

The funny thing about 66 is that about a quarter of those are things you could completely understand in about 3 seconds (example: A binary operation is something like + or * which takes two inputs and gives one output), about a quarter are things which you could understand vaguely pretty quickly (a rotation group is a collection of rigid motions together with the operation of "do one motion then do the other"), and the other half are things that I couldn't explain to you well in a month. And there's absolutely no way for you to know which are which.

I've read a fair amount of Martin Gardner type math, and I have an intuitive understanding of a number of math concepts, but a technical development of these concepts is completely mysterious. Not only that, it's often several hundred very dense pages of mysteriousness and not easy to read even for professional mathematicians.

And that is only the developed theory with all the kinks worked out -- the creative steps on the way to the theory were much more mysterious yet.

62 -- I was thinking along the lines that the way at least some friendships seem to work involves one friend feeling too reticent to ask, for fear of prying, while the friend feels sad never to be asked. Sometimes friendships and conversations just aren't that easy.

Most annoying - and most common - thing to say a woman in mathematics, when I was an undergrad and a grad student: "Oh, do you want to be a teacher?"

I used to say back, "No, do you?"

65: "oh, you must be really smart."

Do they follow it up, too?

"oh, you must be really smart."

My mom says I am!

Huh. Is teaching calculus, or whatever on roughly that level, really mindnumbingly dull? Again, it seems more distant from your real academic research than teaching a survey American History class is for a historian.

To enjoy teaching calculus, you must enjoy *teaching*. For mathematicians who are strictly in it for the high-powered stuff, calculus is often considered mind-numbingly dull.

73: I don't think that's particular to math. I don't know if guys get it, but it seems to be the standard response to any kind of graduate education, at least.

It seems fair enough to me; most graduate education *is* about producing more professors.

76-->77.

Several people I know think that stats should be college algebra instead of calculus, for people who only take one year. As a student I found number theory and formal logic much more interesting than calculus.

I'd much rather teach a survey course on mathematics that dealt with ideas rather than teaching how to compute derivatives to a bunch of people who are only there because their majors require it to weed people out. A year of teaching people to be worse at computing integrals than integrals.com isn't the most fulfulling kind of teaching.

On the other hand, there are certain joys to teaching independent of material. And the main classes for majors (algebra, topology, number theory, complex analysis, etc.) are all pretty fun even if they're 200 years old.

76, 77: And at research universties, courses like calculus are very frequently pawned off on grad students or adjunct faculty. As an extreme case, Harvard has a whole sub-faculty of lecturers, separate from the research faculty, responsible for teaching low level stuff like calculus.

78: But when it's said to you as an undergraduate, the implication is "Do you want to be a high school teacher?"

Plus calculus is the goose that lays golden eggs. We can't complain about it too much, without intro calculus most of us wouldn't have jobs.

I shudder to think what will happen when the engineering departments realize that they can teach calculus for engineers better than mathematicians can.

82: Sure, and I get that too. But I think that's at least as much about whoever's asking not being able to imagine themselves or anyone they know actually being a mathematician, or knowing what that actually involves, as it is about sexism. Plus, teaching's a worthwhile occupation. I try not to get annoyed about the "teacher" comments.

Then again, I sometimes invite them by saying "I teach" when people ask what I do--saying "I profess" seems obnoxious, and if there's any ensuing conversation it usually comes out that I teach at a university.

I don't know if guys get it, but it seems to be the standard response to any kind of graduate education, at least.

It seems fair enough to me; most graduate education *is* about producing more professors.

Guys certainly got it thirty years ago, and it is a fair question. "Not badly enough," the honest answer for me, took a while to figure out.

I usually handle this on a case-by-case basis, but it's not easy. With friends, I trust that I understand cues well enough to stop probing when they don't want to talk.

With colleagues I tend to float a trial balloon by keeping things more abstract -- once someone was talking to me about a career change and I said "I don't know whether you have specific plans as far as having children, but one of the good things about Career X is..." thus leaving it open for her to either chime in with her childbearing plans or simply ignore it.

Family issues can be especially fraught. Asking, "Oh, are you going home for the holidays?" or "So when are you guys going to have kids?" or any innocuous variant thereof can be really painful for people who have bad/no relationships with their parents or have just had a miscarriage.

Then again, I once asked innocently at a small dinner party what someone was studying and when they would finish, and was roundly chastised for both. It did not endear me to going to parties full of academics.

There's a great exchange in one of Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently books where a character meets Dirk Gently the first time, asks what he does, learns he's a private detective, and there's an awkward pause. The other character then that she tires of always being asked the same question about her profession, so she strives not to ask the obvious question about others' professions. Dirk Gently responds that most people pause awkwardly.

That said, I've always taken it as a responsibility not to ask the obvious question, but I suspect that this comes off as too-clever more often than it succeeds.

I think that I tend, as an alternate, to respond to basic info with some related info or experience of my own, rather than stringing together questions. Sometimes it probably seems self-absorbed, but when done right, it gives the other person a chance to either key in on some aspect I've raised, or to talk more about themselves, or to change the subject completely.

I'm sure you've all been worried about who posted 69. Well, worry no more. I posted it.

phew.

88: From Texas, no less.

The fan of AACR2 (sorry, forgot who that was) is no doubt familiar with that old favorite, "You must be really good at shelving!" and its variants, particularly, "Wait, you went to grad school to learn how to shelve books?"

The followup question I get these days is usually "Huh?" My answer is some technical-cluefulness-level-adjusted version of, "I make the Intarwebs go."

The conversation's moved on to math, it seems, but I just wanted to pop in and say that of course people are welcome to read (and comment, if they like) on my new blog. I didn't make a big thing out of starting a new one because it seemed presumptuous to think people in general should care.

I have the problem that I tend to freak out people whom I don't know well by telling them something really weird. I think 'here's an amusing anecdote that's sure to get things moving along' and the person's reaction is 'holy shit that is fucked up right there.' can be awkward.

I don't know if the real mathematicians are still checking this thread, but are there any ideal mathematicians reading this blog?

The ideal mathematician's work is intelligible only to a small group of specialists, numbering a few dozen or at most a few hundred. This group has existed only for a few decades, and there is every possibility that it may become extinct in another few decades. However, the mathemati- cian regards his work as part of the very structure of the world, containing truths which are valid forever, from the beginning of time, even in the most remote corner of the universe.

..........

The difficulties of communication emerged vividly when the ideal mathematician received a visit from a public in- formation officer of the University.

_P.I.O.:_ I appreciate your taking time to talk to me. Math- ematics was always my worst subject.

_I.M.:_ That's O.K. You've got your job to do.

_P.I.O.:_ I was given the assignment of writing a press re- lease about the renewal of your grant. The usual thing would be a one-sentence item, `Pro- fessor X received a grant of _Y_ dollars to con- tinue his research on the decision problem for non-Riemannian hypersquares.' But I thought it would be a good challenge for me to try and give people a better idea about what your work really involves. First of all, what is a hyper- square?

_I.M.:_ I hate to say this, but the truth is, if I told you what it is, you would think I was trying to put you down and make you feel stupid. The definition is really somewhat technical, and it just wouldn't mean anything at all to most people.

_P.I.O.:_ Would it be something engineers or physicists would know about?

_I.M.:_ No. Well, maybe a few theoretical physicists. Very few.

_P.I.O.:_ Even if you can't give me the real definition, can't you give me some idea of the general nature and purpose of your work?

_I.M.:_ All right, I'll try. Consider a smooth function _f_ on a measure space "O" taking its value in a sheaf of germs equipped with a convergence structure of saturated type. In the simplest case...

_P.I.O.:_ Perhaps I'm asking the wrong questions. Can you tell me something about the applications of your research?

_I.M.:_ Applications?

_P.I.O.:_ Yes, applications.

_I.M.:_ I've been told that some attempts have been made to use non-Riemannian hypersquares as models for elementary particles in nuclear physics. I don't know if any progress was made.

_P.I.O.:_ Have there been any major breakthroughs re- cently in your area? Any exciting new results that people are talking about?

_I.M.:_ Sure, there's the Steinberg-Bergstein paper. That's the biggest advance in at least five years.

_P.I.O.:_ What did they do?

_I.M.:_ I can't tell you.

_P.I.O.:_ I see. Do you feel there is adequate support in re- search in your field?

_I.M.:_ Adequate? It's hardly lip service. Some of the best young people in the field are being denied re- search support. I have no doubt that with extra support we could be making much more rapid progress on the decision problem.

_P.I.O.:_ Do you see any way that the work in your area could lead to anything that would be under- standable to the ordinary citizen of this country?

_I.M.:_ No.

_P.I.O.:_ How about engineers or scientists?

_I.M.:_ I doubt it very much.

_P.I.O.:_ Among pure mathematicians, would the majority be interested in or acquainted with your work?

_I.M.:_ No, it would be a small minority.

_P.I.O.:_ Is there anything at all that you would like to say about your work?

_I.M.:_ Just the usual one sentence will be fine.

_P.I.O.:_ Don't you want the public to sympathize with your work and support it?

_I.M.:_ Sure, but not if it means debasing myself.

_P.I.O.:_ Debasing yourself?

_I.M.:_ Getting involved in public relations gimmicks, that sort of thing.

_P.I.O.:_ I see. Well, thanks again for your time.

_I.M.:_ That's O.K. You've got a job to do.