On being Thurstonized by Benson Farb
Originally shared by Luis Guzman
On being Thurstonized by Benson Farb
Being a Thurston student was inspiring and frustrating – often both at once. At our second meeting I told Bill that I had decided to work on understanding fundamental groups of negatively curved manifolds with cusps. In response I was introduced to the famous “Thurston squint”, whereby he looked at you, squint his eyes, give you a puzzled look, then gaze into the distance (still with the squint). After two minutes of this he turned to me and said: “Oh, I see, it’s like a froth of bubbles, and the bubbles have a bounded amount of interaction.” Being a diligent graduate student, I dutifully wrote down in my notes: “Froth of bubbles. Bounded interaction.” After our meeting I ran to the library to begin work on the problem. I looked at the notes. Froth? Bubbles? Is that what he said? What does that mean? I was stuck.
Three agonizing years of work later I solved the problem. It’s a lot to explain in detail, but if I were forced to summarize my thesis in five words or less, I’d go with: “Froth of bubbles. Bounded interaction.”
http://www.math.uchicago.edu/~farb/papers/thurston.pdf
On being Thurstonized by Benson Farb
Being a Thurston student was inspiring and frustrating – often both at once. At our second meeting I told Bill that I had decided to work on understanding fundamental groups of negatively curved manifolds with cusps. In response I was introduced to the famous “Thurston squint”, whereby he looked at you, squint his eyes, give you a puzzled look, then gaze into the distance (still with the squint). After two minutes of this he turned to me and said: “Oh, I see, it’s like a froth of bubbles, and the bubbles have a bounded amount of interaction.” Being a diligent graduate student, I dutifully wrote down in my notes: “Froth of bubbles. Bounded interaction.” After our meeting I ran to the library to begin work on the problem. I looked at the notes. Froth? Bubbles? Is that what he said? What does that mean? I was stuck.
Three agonizing years of work later I solved the problem. It’s a lot to explain in detail, but if I were forced to summarize my thesis in five words or less, I’d go with: “Froth of bubbles. Bounded interaction.”
http://www.math.uchicago.edu/~farb/papers/thurston.pdf
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