Jury-Law books

The
phrase I say to people just to get it across is that,
among other things, by the second semester we were
discussing the differential geometry of Banach
manifolds. That's usually when their eyes bug out,
because most people don't start talking about Banach
manifolds until their second year of graduate school."
Starting with 75 students, the class quickly melted
down to 20 by the end of the second semester. Of that
20, says Harbater, "only 10 really knew what they were
doing." Of that 10, 8 would go on to become future
mathematics professors, 1 would go on to teach physics.
"The other one," emphasizes Harbater, "was Richard Stallman."
Seth Breidbart, a fellow Math 55 classmate, remembers
Stallman distinguishing himself from his peers even then.
"He was a stickler in some very strange ways," says
Breidbart. There is a standard technique in math which
everybody does wrong. It's an abuse of notation where
you have to define a function for something and what
you do is you define a function and then you prove that
it's well defined.


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