Who'd a Thunk it?

The big news this week concerns Dr. Darius D. Martin who has earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. The path has been long (UCSB is excited to retire the oldest student ID in history) because Darius didn’t want to write a thesis, he wanted to win a Nobel Prize. I will take this opportunity to review father-son conversations over the last few years.

“My paper must astonish! It’s magical.”

“Do it on-time,” I admonish.”It’s maniacal.”

“You’ve complained,” Darius exclaimed.

“The path is fraught,” his father thought.

“It will be great.” Darius replied.

“It will be late.” “Before I’ve died?”

Unlike his Dad – who wrote a thesis proving that “Two Heads are Better Than One” (I am not making this up), Darius (The Great) likes complexity. His thesis has integral signs and math stuff.

I knew, of course, that the final submission would take place at the last hour of the final day. And, because Darius needed to have UCSB send a completion note to the American University of Beirut by September 15, I naively assumed that he would be done on September 14. Unfortunately, one of his committee members was on holiday – scheduled to return on the 16th. Darius talked him into coming back a day early and convinced Beirut to interpret “September 15” as “September 15, Pacific Daylight Time”. It was the last possible minute.

Nazy has interrupted the preparation of this letter. She claims:

“Darius finished, Dan! It’s great! So stop making jokes. Besides, didn’t you spend 10 years at Georgia Tech?”

“But I got an undergraduate degree and a..”

“And when you left, didn’t Georgia Tech celebrate retirement of the oldest student ID..”

“Wait a minute, Nazy.”

“And didn’t you finalize your Ph.D. the last possible day?”

Flashback: June, 1974

I was getting nervous. It was noon – scheduled time for my defense of thesis. I also had to deliver three copies, signed by my advisory committee, to the graduate office before 4:00PM. My professorship in Memphis was contingent on receiving this information on, or before, this date. Nazy and I were booked on a flight to Iran the next day. We hadn’t heard from my outside advisor, Dick Kain, who was driving to Atlanta from Minneapolis. We couldn’t get in touch with him. [It was 1974: mobile phones had not been invented.] At 12:30 Dick called from a payphone [In 1974 these telephones were quite common. It was a wired device that was coin-operated.] at a nearby McDonalds. [It was 1974: McDonalds had been around forever.]

The thesis defense, rescheduled for 1:00PM went flawlessly. As Dick signed the document (at 3:30):

“You’ve misspelled my friend Lewis Cobbam’s name,” he told me.

“Chobbam?” I replied.

“No ‘h’,” Dick said. “Just fix it before you hand in the final version.”

“Naturally,” I replied. (Evasively.)

Thoughtfully, I carried my thesis to the graduate office. I submitted it unchanged. [There was only one person in Atlanta certified to type a Georgia Tech Ph.D. thesis and there was no time to take it to her.] When we returned from Iran, I checked out the three copies in the library and crossed out, in ink, the superfluous ‘h’.

Present Day

“Dad,” Darius had said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t submit the thesis. It will be published and accessible on the web. Someone might find a mistake.”

"Undoubtedly, Darius wouldn’t approve of my approach," I thought. I said something else:

“That will mean that someone is reading it, Dar. They’ll cite your paper. Your academic stature will expand. Perhaps you should offer a reward for people who find errors – and cite your paper. Google rankings, Dar, are based on cross-references. If your paper is cited often, you’ll move to the top. Make errors intentionally.”

“Is that what you did?”

“Of course, not, Dar. I make my errors unintentionally.”

“But..”

“Submit and get out, Dar. It’s time.”

“Do you think?”

“Yep.”

Darius celebrated with his sisters before leaving for a quick trip to Thailand and Cambodia. On the 25th he passed through Zurich “on his way” (routing courtesy of Darius) to Beirut. He will start work at the American University on September 28. Friends responded predictably.

“He’s working in Lebanon? As in Lebanon?”

“Of course,” I replied. “He is Darius. As in Darius.”
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