Talking to Mathematicians

1. A woman in my department who has taught our freshman-level classes for very many years walked into the faculty lounge yesterday, and we all grinned at her. She grinned back and exclaimed, "Finally I'm getting the respect I deserve." Her name is Rita.


2. Someone asked me a convoluted algebra question yesterday. Something about Laurent polynomial rings, irreducibles, factoring, plus a bunch of other stuff. This morning I realized that the situation he described happens trivially in any Z-algebra without zero divisors. Unless he's left out an important assumption? In any case, I sketched out the details of the construction on the board in the anteroom of his office. Now that I think about it some more, I think that this is a variation on something that is an exercise in Hungerford (p432, #2).


3. My parents are visiting this week (until Sunday). Noting a family resemblence, a colleague says to me, "You and your mom are both cross-eyed!"