25 Random Things About Me

1. When I was about ten years old, I shook the hand of Hubert Humphrey at a political rally in Philadelphia. Immediately afterwards, the crowd pushed me against the platform and I was almost crushed to death.

2. I have some metal screws in my left knee, which were put in after I tore my anterior cruciate ligament playing ultimate frisbee.

3. I have one extremely odd talent: I can usually tell, just by looking at the fonts contained in a single page of a published mathematics paper, what journal the paper appeared in, and I can often estimate the year the paper appeared.

4. I almost died at a Bruce Springsteen concert in Oakland, California in the early 1980's from an asthma attack brought on by people smoking cigarettes.

5. My favorite number is 43.

6. One of my favorite songwriters is someone few people have ever heard of: Michael Peter Smith. He wrote The Dutchman, among other songs. (He is not to be confused with the insipid Christian songwriter Michael W. Smith.)

7. I really dislike jazz, mostly because I don't understand it. Nearly all jazz just sounds like random noise to me.

8. At my first talk at a mathematics conference, Paul Erdős was in the audience. He promptly fell asleep, and I felt very disappointed. Later, I was delighted to receive a request from him for a reprint.

9. I was almost shot in Chicago when I was about seven years old. My father had taken me on a business trip, and we were walking down Michigan Avenue when a man ran past me and knocked me down. When I got up, I turned around and looked into the barrel of a gun, held by a policeman who was chasing a bank robber -- the man who had knocked me down. My father pushed me up against the wall of the building and covered me with his body so I wouldn't get shot. The policeman ran past and captured the bank robber without a shot. We walked past as the robber was sprawled on the sidewalk with a bag of money spread out beside him.

10. The longest race I ever ran was the "20 km de Paris", which I ran in 1982. I finished in about two hours.

11. I broke the middle finger of my right hand playing 16-inch softball -- which is played without a mitt - in Chicago, Illinois in 1984 or so. When I caught the ball that broke my finger, I didn't feel any pain, although I did notice that my finger was bent at a funny angle. It wasn't until I tried to move it back to its normal position that it began to hurt. When I went to the emergency room, the doctor took one look at my finger and said, "Been playing 16-inch softball?" The world's expert on the mallet-finger injury lives in Chicago, where he operates daily on people with this injury. When I had my surgery, I asked the doctor if I would be able to play piano afterwards. He said, "Can you play the piano now?". I guess he had heard the joke before. I had to teach for several weeks with my middle finger in a cast, which delighted my students no end.

12. I speak with a strong Philadelphia accent. I was once walking down the street in Chicago and a car approached me, slowed down, and the driver rolled down the window and asked for directions. I said no more than about ten words, something along the lines of "You go down to the next corner, turn right, and look for the sign" -- at which point the driver said to me, "Oh, you're from Philadelphia!" I said, "Yes, how did you know?" He said, "Well, I'm a linguist."

13. One of my best friends from high school was killed in a fall while studying ayurvedic medicine in India. He would have been a great doctor. I still miss him.

14. My favorite dessert is banana cream pie.

15. I once spent the night in Penn Station in New York City, waiting for the first train from New York back to Philadelphia. There were many strange people there. One man looked at me and went "mmmmm". Then he said it again, a little louder. When I turned to look at him, he shouted "MMMMM!" at me at the top of his lungs.

16. My middle name is "Outlaw".

17. My favorite living mathematician is H. W. Lenstra, Jr. .

18. My last name means "governor" in Hebrew, but I'm not Jewish.

19. My favorite programming language is APL, and I still use it frequently.

20. I think being a university professor is one of the best jobs in the world. But not everyone would enjoy it.

21. I have taken some very long bike rides, including Paris to Bordeaux and Vienna to Warsaw.

22. Two of my favorite movies are The Great Escape and Local Hero.

23. My grandfather, a Russian immigrant, sold "notions" out of a basket on the streets of Philadelphia. He knew very few words of English, and whenever anyone asked him if he had something particular for sale (needle, thread, etc.), he would say "Look in basket!" Once a woman ran up to him and asked frantically, "Have you seen my child?" He replied, "Look in basket!"

24. My favorite animal is the moose.

25. My favorite French singers are Renaud and Georges Brassens.