This semester I am learning with a professor who has his own Wikipedia page. He is not liked by many students because he goes through knowledge very fast, skipping lots of things in the middle. But he does have many personal anecdotes about his research and teaching career that I do find fun when listening to.

He said that the hardest math problems in GRE are usually NP-hard. In computation context, NP-hard problems do not have polynomial time solutions, thus take a long time to solve. But for humans, it means one cannot find an easy formula or fast determinstic algorithm to solve such problems. That is why such problems are chosen for GRE – to only allow students with creative thinking to solve it. (Is creativity the missing part of computers to solve tranditionally hard problems? What is creativity formally anyway?)

Here further observations about this professor:

  • He has a big office, twice as big as a normal one at my university. His has a guest table section, and a working section. On the bookshelf, I saw a ton of Springer books in yellow covers, mostly about statistics, maths, etc.
  • He makes sure we know he was a Math professor in MIT and Princeton. He then failed a faculty interview to Stanford, thus had to work at U Minnesota. He considered it a failure. It is not sure what he thinks about being at UT Dallas now.
  • He walks by leaning forward and touch the ground with his toes first. Teenagers typically walk like that.
  • He has met a lot of great theoretical computer scientists, like Michael Sipser and Stephen Cook.
  • In an office hour that I came to him, he asked me if I came from Yuènán.