> At the end of May I left Szeged. I was grateful for all he had done, but it was only much later that I appreciated reasonably well his contribution to my education. On the overnight train from Budapest to Venice, a young Hungarian man accompanied by a young woman kindly asked me in poor German to leave them the compartment for the night. They had just been married that day and were beginning their honeymoon. On arrival at Venice the next morning, he opened the corridor window and got off the train, while his bride, who spoke only Hungarian, lowered their suitcase through the window. Then a terrible thing happened. The train pulled out, with her still on it. The poor girl was cut off from everything that she knew, everything she had been living with. I knew what she felt. Hadn't I too just been cut off from my previous life?
It __is__ better. It helps him explain his case as to why he chose to accept the Cutting Travelling Fellowship rather than work for Von Neumman, and he also mentions that the job was later split into 4 parts.
The original link on the other hand just dismisses this as "he fled to Hungary". True, but an incomplete truth.
Thanks for sharing this.
"Once, after I suggested a problem, he[Frigyes Riesz] he repeated it slowly twice to make certain he understood. Then, absolute silence. After half an hour, he exclaimed "Ja uj. I have it. Yes, I have it.", and he leaned to me, his eyes full of joy and mischief. But that was the end of it. He never made me privy to his solution." - We can learn a lot by working with individuals like these, who sometimes reveal nothing about their method in solving a problem, evoking (mild) stress/frustration upon others until they too solve the problem or at least spend some good time thinking about it.
Mmm. In particular it notes that (a) in previous years the assistant had been only expected to do the first two parts of the job description and (b) after Lorch turned it down they ended up dividing the work between four assistants. So it's more of an example of an over-ambitious job description than the reality of being an assistant to von Neumann...
What they don't tell you is that at the Institute for Advanced Study the poor assistant had to use the same filing cabinet for his list of duties, to do list, and all of Von Neumann's correspondence and papers.
While up at Harvard the assistants were given separate cabinets to make their lives easier. But woe betide the poor assistant who tried to put a file in the wrong cabinet!
Please feel free to include in your comedy CV that you managed to sneak this one past a computer science professor until the third read-through. Kudos. :)
As a young post doc at the Institute for Advance Study, my Dad knew von Neuman, who according to my Dad, tended to work late at night and work with loud music playing - very much like young hackers today!
I remember reading a similar anecdote in the book Turing's Cathedral, where it suggested that von Neumann had a particular preference for loud marches. It also makes me think about what Stanislaw Ulam wrote of von Neumann[1]:
"If one has to divide mathematicians, as Poincaré proposed, into two types—those with visual and those with auditory intuition—Johnny perhaps belonged to the latter."
I've read a funny anecdote (no idea whether it is accurate) that von Neumann's loud gramophone music was a big source of frustration for his office neighbor, Albert Einstein.
It was traditional belief that Einstein's assistant did nothing. The only requirement for him was to be a Jewish exile from Nazi Germany.
Einstein's assistant Kemeny ended up designing the BASIC language and being one of the founding fathers of computer science. His assistant Rosen ended up being president of Ben Gurion Univesity and co-founding the Israeli Academy of Sciences. Based on their accomplishments, seems to me like their religion was not the only requirement made of them.
If you read it closely, it seems like fluency in advanced mathematics and significantly above-average IQ were implicit criteria. At least that was my takeaway.
While academia is a place of good ideas and discussions, the power-distance and the use of students as very cheap labour with the promise of a higher place of importance someday is a dark side of it
Low skilled workers are treated better and more fairly than Graduate Students in a lot of occasions
Academia is stuck in the past in that sense. And it is already hurting them in quite a few disciplines where 'being published' is great but trumped by 'being able to afford a normal life'. So it filters out people that are willing to put their lives on hold in order to have their names at the top of a couple of papers. Some of them find that the lives they put on hold can not be put together again after a decade.
Graduate students are as a rule underpaid, overworked and if they're unlucky harassed to boot and all that for the privilege of having someone else then finally take most or even all of the credit for all the hard work.
Academia is similar to many other fields in that you roughly get what you pay for. That doesn't mean you can't save some money here or there or that money is not wasted here or there, but as a rule of thumb this generally holds.
My biggest quirk about the universities and institutes I've worked for so far is not the way they deal with grad students or postdocs, it's about seemingly 'unimportant' issues. Things like large, noisy, shared offices, lack of whiteboards, unnecessary bureaucracy, and lack of paid linguistic editing. At universities money tends to be saved at the wrong end, private businesses are much better at creating productive environments. Especially the constant lack of office space is hampering productivity. The priorities tend to be wrong (outside of a few centers of excellence), focused on getting as many researchers as possible. Instead they should spend a bit less on human resources and a bit more on a good work environment.
At least that's my personal experience and opinion.
Already hurting them, and has been hurting them for almost a decade, even more at this point.
I was thinking about continuing my education to do research in distributed computing, but I learned midway through my undergraduate, majoring in computer science with the "Software Engineering" track, that our field was already playing catchup with industry. I learned this because I worked for a startup my senior year. Their pace, learning, and new innovation was nothing our dusty class with out of touch professors were able to keep up with. Even the ones that were trying to be "cool" by teaching stuff like Ruby on Rails (mind you, this was in 2008 so it was the hip thing at the time) instead of Java Server Faces, it was just bad. You could tell the professors had no idea what it took to build software. After being in the industry about 10 years now, probably the biggest joke of a course I took and arguably a complete waste of money was CS 3100 -- Software Engineering. It was an entire class on Object Oriented programming with Java, and using UML diagrams to model everything, and CRC cards and all this object oriented cruft. Everything was an object nail to drill with your object hammer. It was at this point I was becoming more familiar with LISPs and dynamic/functional programming languages, and I started to care more about behavior rather than creating a tangled web of leaky abstractions.
Anyways, why go get my masters in distributed computing when I know it will be hilariously out of date and all the best innovation in distributed computing is coming from large, internet-scale companies such as Twitter, Google, Netflix, Facebook et all? But unless I could get into Stanford, which is essentially the big tech firm's R&D arm, I don't see the point. I was thinking of the Georgia Tech OMSCS, but I think I am too jaded at this point.
True in most cases I'd say. In this case, even for $200/month and working hours of 60-80h/week I'd still argue most people would be proud to have this position. The learning, the networking effects, the constant intellectual challenge. I think this is also value, and in some regards a lot more rare than money.
Eh, I think my pride and job satisfaction would drop off quickly if my boss was constantly mad at me for not completing the work I was supposed to complete; and my loved ones were constantly mad at me for not making time for them.
Even learning and networking are not guaranteed. Your life is basically dependent on your relationship with your advisor. He/she can make or break you as a PhD student...
In my case, it's a bit different, but it has been disappointing enough that I'm trying to ditch the program with my MSc in hand.
In some ultra-low power distance societies, places like Sweden, the idea that anyone, no matter how important, is ever entitled to an assistant or secretary is almost anathema.
Imagine if von Neumann had been required to do all of that in addition to making his own airline and hotel reservations, as is the case for many university professors these days.
That is, when I visited Sweden for a consulting job about 15 years ago, there was definitely a secretary for the group I visited. She helped organize the paperwork for the visit, booked my hotel and taxi, etc.
> Being the Secretary-General's secretary means helping coordinate, plan and prepare meetings, travel and reception of foreign and domestic guests as well as coordinate, prepare and plan other commitments. For example, involve helping to prepare information, book and plan trips and meetings, and to be responsible for the calendar as well as ex. certain world surveillance.
> You will also be responsible for calls, mailing and agenda appointments, and telephone answering services as well as daily office tasks such as copying, billing, updating of records, ordering office supplies, and providing easier computer support, etc.
Yes, and as you can see from one of the comments below, the same is largely true of neighbouring Norway.
> That is, when I visited Sweden for a consulting job about 15 years ago, there was definitely a secretary for the group I visited. She helped organize the paperwork for the visit, booked my hotel and taxi, etc.
Notice that I talked about cultural views on secretaries, not the existence of secretaries within the country's borders. It's a downwards trend, I expect they're even more thinly spread now than 15 years ago.
It's not unexpected that the secretary-general of any organisation, even in Sweden, has a secretary. And of course theirs will be the last to go, with modern universities favouring administration over faculty, as it's the former that brings the cash, the latter only cost money (with that attitude, why not fire the faculty altogether?).
The idea that anyone is entitled to a secretary, that a secretary is a kind of status symbol, is rightfully falling out of fashion, and not just in Sweden.
But it's not being replaced by nothing, it being replaced by (non-personal) function staff that offloads specific tasks. The department has student relations officers that deal with scheduling, enrollment, tracking grades etc, the university has a travel office, email and digital calendars, available on mobile devices, simply removes a significant part of the need for secretaries in the first place - and professors have TAs (who would probably be responsible for a good chunk of the tasks described today). They just don't have general-purpose personal staff.
> The idea that anyone is entitled to a secretary, that a secretary is a kind of status symbol, is rightfully falling out of fashion, and not just in Sweden.
Indeed, the opposite error, seen in many ultra-high power distance societies, is arguably worse: when a secretary and a desk not facing a wall becomes an end in itself and nothing of value is produced.
> But it's not being replaced by nothing, it being replaced by (non-personal) function staff that offloads specific tasks.
Those things have been around for a long time, but treating it as a replacement rather than a complement to general-purpose secretaries means there will be no-one to do the more open-ended tasks, or tasks specific to the work of a particular person or group.
The general idea of a secretary does make economic sense. In theory it's good if a professor spends more time researching/teaching and less time typing stuff and managing their appointments.
I'm a generalist and would feel rather odd having a secretary but I can understand the general economic argument. It also makes sense to have a maid and someone who mows your lawn etc. etc. (except if you find the work inherently entertaining of course)
In Sweden and in other places, everything, including the universities, is nowadays run by economists. Since university professors don't produce anything that has any immediate monetary value it of course make perfect sense to save money by replacing administrative personel that costs money with the professors time, which is free since the professors pay their own sallaries with external funding.
One amusing aside in that article was that one of the professors who appear to have received the budget to pay an assistant to nothing was Oswald Veblen.
His uncle Thorstein Veblen surely would have had a field day with this idea.
Hmmm. If you think what the source (Plover’s shitpost blog, not an email) provides is not beneficial, then I’d think the link should be to the original document.
I, on the other hand, think his selection and publication of this excerpt has merit and is useful. His framing of the quote is what drew me to read it in the first place.
The original this is taken from is better [0].
0. https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/2...
Wow, the ending is brutal:
> At the end of May I left Szeged. I was grateful for all he had done, but it was only much later that I appreciated reasonably well his contribution to my education. On the overnight train from Budapest to Venice, a young Hungarian man accompanied by a young woman kindly asked me in poor German to leave them the compartment for the night. They had just been married that day and were beginning their honeymoon. On arrival at Venice the next morning, he opened the corridor window and got off the train, while his bride, who spoke only Hungarian, lowered their suitcase through the window. Then a terrible thing happened. The train pulled out, with her still on it. The poor girl was cut off from everything that she knew, everything she had been living with. I knew what she felt. Hadn't I too just been cut off from my previous life?
It __is__ better. It helps him explain his case as to why he chose to accept the Cutting Travelling Fellowship rather than work for Von Neumman, and he also mentions that the job was later split into 4 parts.
The original link on the other hand just dismisses this as "he fled to Hungary". True, but an incomplete truth.
Thanks for sharing this. "Once, after I suggested a problem, he[Frigyes Riesz] he repeated it slowly twice to make certain he understood. Then, absolute silence. After half an hour, he exclaimed "Ja uj. I have it. Yes, I have it.", and he leaned to me, his eyes full of joy and mischief. But that was the end of it. He never made me privy to his solution." - We can learn a lot by working with individuals like these, who sometimes reveal nothing about their method in solving a problem, evoking (mild) stress/frustration upon others until they too solve the problem or at least spend some good time thinking about it.
Mmm. In particular it notes that (a) in previous years the assistant had been only expected to do the first two parts of the job description and (b) after Lorch turned it down they ended up dividing the work between four assistants. So it's more of an example of an over-ambitious job description than the reality of being an assistant to von Neumann...
Nice post. About the article: it must have taken some balls (for lack of a better expression) to turn down the position as von Neumann's assistant.
This is beautiful. Really interesting reading. Thanks.
What they don't tell you is that at the Institute for Advanced Study the poor assistant had to use the same filing cabinet for his list of duties, to do list, and all of Von Neumann's correspondence and papers.
While up at Harvard the assistants were given separate cabinets to make their lives easier. But woe betide the poor assistant who tried to put a file in the wrong cabinet!
Please feel free to include in your comedy CV that you managed to sneak this one past a computer science professor until the third read-through. Kudos. :)
This is an excellent and under-appreciated joke. Bravo.
What's the joke?
1 reply →
As a young post doc at the Institute for Advance Study, my Dad knew von Neuman, who according to my Dad, tended to work late at night and work with loud music playing - very much like young hackers today!
I remember reading a similar anecdote in the book Turing's Cathedral, where it suggested that von Neumann had a particular preference for loud marches. It also makes me think about what Stanislaw Ulam wrote of von Neumann[1]:
"If one has to divide mathematicians, as Poincaré proposed, into two types—those with visual and those with auditory intuition—Johnny perhaps belonged to the latter."
[1] http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1958-64-03/S0002-9904-1958-...
Interesting.
Not completely similar but somewhat interesting, here's an interview where Feynman admits to not being "great" (for lack of a better word) at music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqtuNXWT0mo
“Lot’s of people love music and I never could carry a tune.”
I've read a funny anecdote (no idea whether it is accurate) that von Neumann's loud gramophone music was a big source of frustration for his office neighbor, Albert Einstein.
It was traditional belief that Einstein's assistant did nothing. The only requirement for him was to be a Jewish exile from Nazi Germany.
Einstein's assistant Kemeny ended up designing the BASIC language and being one of the founding fathers of computer science. His assistant Rosen ended up being president of Ben Gurion Univesity and co-founding the Israeli Academy of Sciences. Based on their accomplishments, seems to me like their religion was not the only requirement made of them.
If you read it closely, it seems like fluency in advanced mathematics and significantly above-average IQ were implicit criteria. At least that was my takeaway.
I think "Jewish" in this case refers to whatever racial criteria Germany was using to choose people to exterminate, not religion.
I think the context is they did nothing as assistants.
It is worth noting that Paul Halmos was an assistant of von Neumann's:
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Halmos.h...
Thanks, this was a good read.
In the German Wikipedia there is a photograph of the lecture timetable, University of Berlin, 1928.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/Ne...
Von Neumann's scheduled his lectures as follows
- Wed and Sunday (!) 9-11 am; - Friday 3.30-5pm - Tue 7-9pm (Invited Talks / Faculty Seminar) - Mon 4-5 pm
I think that was uncommon even in the old days.
While academia is a place of good ideas and discussions, the power-distance and the use of students as very cheap labour with the promise of a higher place of importance someday is a dark side of it
Low skilled workers are treated better and more fairly than Graduate Students in a lot of occasions
Academia is stuck in the past in that sense. And it is already hurting them in quite a few disciplines where 'being published' is great but trumped by 'being able to afford a normal life'. So it filters out people that are willing to put their lives on hold in order to have their names at the top of a couple of papers. Some of them find that the lives they put on hold can not be put together again after a decade.
Graduate students are as a rule underpaid, overworked and if they're unlucky harassed to boot and all that for the privilege of having someone else then finally take most or even all of the credit for all the hard work.
Academia is similar to many other fields in that you roughly get what you pay for. That doesn't mean you can't save some money here or there or that money is not wasted here or there, but as a rule of thumb this generally holds.
My biggest quirk about the universities and institutes I've worked for so far is not the way they deal with grad students or postdocs, it's about seemingly 'unimportant' issues. Things like large, noisy, shared offices, lack of whiteboards, unnecessary bureaucracy, and lack of paid linguistic editing. At universities money tends to be saved at the wrong end, private businesses are much better at creating productive environments. Especially the constant lack of office space is hampering productivity. The priorities tend to be wrong (outside of a few centers of excellence), focused on getting as many researchers as possible. Instead they should spend a bit less on human resources and a bit more on a good work environment.
At least that's my personal experience and opinion.
6 replies →
Already hurting them, and has been hurting them for almost a decade, even more at this point.
I was thinking about continuing my education to do research in distributed computing, but I learned midway through my undergraduate, majoring in computer science with the "Software Engineering" track, that our field was already playing catchup with industry. I learned this because I worked for a startup my senior year. Their pace, learning, and new innovation was nothing our dusty class with out of touch professors were able to keep up with. Even the ones that were trying to be "cool" by teaching stuff like Ruby on Rails (mind you, this was in 2008 so it was the hip thing at the time) instead of Java Server Faces, it was just bad. You could tell the professors had no idea what it took to build software. After being in the industry about 10 years now, probably the biggest joke of a course I took and arguably a complete waste of money was CS 3100 -- Software Engineering. It was an entire class on Object Oriented programming with Java, and using UML diagrams to model everything, and CRC cards and all this object oriented cruft. Everything was an object nail to drill with your object hammer. It was at this point I was becoming more familiar with LISPs and dynamic/functional programming languages, and I started to care more about behavior rather than creating a tangled web of leaky abstractions.
Anyways, why go get my masters in distributed computing when I know it will be hilariously out of date and all the best innovation in distributed computing is coming from large, internet-scale companies such as Twitter, Google, Netflix, Facebook et all? But unless I could get into Stanford, which is essentially the big tech firm's R&D arm, I don't see the point. I was thinking of the Georgia Tech OMSCS, but I think I am too jaded at this point.
6 replies →
True in most cases I'd say. In this case, even for $200/month and working hours of 60-80h/week I'd still argue most people would be proud to have this position. The learning, the networking effects, the constant intellectual challenge. I think this is also value, and in some regards a lot more rare than money.
Eh, I think my pride and job satisfaction would drop off quickly if my boss was constantly mad at me for not completing the work I was supposed to complete; and my loved ones were constantly mad at me for not making time for them.
Even learning and networking are not guaranteed. Your life is basically dependent on your relationship with your advisor. He/she can make or break you as a PhD student...
In my case, it's a bit different, but it has been disappointing enough that I'm trying to ditch the program with my MSc in hand.
I wonder how long his assistants lasted.
In some ultra-low power distance societies, places like Sweden, the idea that anyone, no matter how important, is ever entitled to an assistant or secretary is almost anathema.
Imagine if von Neumann had been required to do all of that in addition to making his own airline and hotel reservations, as is the case for many university professors these days.
Could you confirm that first statement?
That is, when I visited Sweden for a consulting job about 15 years ago, there was definitely a secretary for the group I visited. She helped organize the paperwork for the visit, booked my hotel and taxi, etc.
The word for secretary in Swedish is "sekreterare", and a search of the Uppsala University domain find things like https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=y&prev... :
> Being the Secretary-General's secretary means helping coordinate, plan and prepare meetings, travel and reception of foreign and domestic guests as well as coordinate, prepare and plan other commitments. For example, involve helping to prepare information, book and plan trips and meetings, and to be responsible for the calendar as well as ex. certain world surveillance.
> You will also be responsible for calls, mailing and agenda appointments, and telephone answering services as well as daily office tasks such as copying, billing, updating of records, ordering office supplies, and providing easier computer support, etc.
There was a secretary for the group, not for any one professor.
If you'd visited in, say, 1925 the professors in the group might've had one secretary each.
5 replies →
> Could you confirm that first statement?
Yes, and as you can see from one of the comments below, the same is largely true of neighbouring Norway.
> That is, when I visited Sweden for a consulting job about 15 years ago, there was definitely a secretary for the group I visited. She helped organize the paperwork for the visit, booked my hotel and taxi, etc.
Notice that I talked about cultural views on secretaries, not the existence of secretaries within the country's borders. It's a downwards trend, I expect they're even more thinly spread now than 15 years ago.
It's not unexpected that the secretary-general of any organisation, even in Sweden, has a secretary. And of course theirs will be the last to go, with modern universities favouring administration over faculty, as it's the former that brings the cash, the latter only cost money (with that attitude, why not fire the faculty altogether?).
3 replies →
The idea that anyone is entitled to a secretary, that a secretary is a kind of status symbol, is rightfully falling out of fashion, and not just in Sweden.
But it's not being replaced by nothing, it being replaced by (non-personal) function staff that offloads specific tasks. The department has student relations officers that deal with scheduling, enrollment, tracking grades etc, the university has a travel office, email and digital calendars, available on mobile devices, simply removes a significant part of the need for secretaries in the first place - and professors have TAs (who would probably be responsible for a good chunk of the tasks described today). They just don't have general-purpose personal staff.
replaced by (non-personal) function staff that offloads specific tasks
And it's more practical since it works even if people in those positions gets sick or are away for holidays.
> The idea that anyone is entitled to a secretary, that a secretary is a kind of status symbol, is rightfully falling out of fashion, and not just in Sweden.
Indeed, the opposite error, seen in many ultra-high power distance societies, is arguably worse: when a secretary and a desk not facing a wall becomes an end in itself and nothing of value is produced.
> But it's not being replaced by nothing, it being replaced by (non-personal) function staff that offloads specific tasks.
Those things have been around for a long time, but treating it as a replacement rather than a complement to general-purpose secretaries means there will be no-one to do the more open-ended tasks, or tasks specific to the work of a particular person or group.
1 reply →
The general idea of a secretary does make economic sense. In theory it's good if a professor spends more time researching/teaching and less time typing stuff and managing their appointments. I'm a generalist and would feel rather odd having a secretary but I can understand the general economic argument. It also makes sense to have a maid and someone who mows your lawn etc. etc. (except if you find the work inherently entertaining of course)
In Sweden and in other places, everything, including the universities, is nowadays run by economists. Since university professors don't produce anything that has any immediate monetary value it of course make perfect sense to save money by replacing administrative personel that costs money with the professors time, which is free since the professors pay their own sallaries with external funding.
> run by economists
I am confused. Perhaps you meant to say managers, administrators or bureaucrats ?
1 reply →
One amusing aside in that article was that one of the professors who appear to have received the budget to pay an assistant to nothing was Oswald Veblen.
His uncle Thorstein Veblen surely would have had a field day with this idea.
This was posted within today, not 1993. Title fix?
It almost entirely consists of a quote from a 1993 document, the fact that someone quoted this in an e-mail today is comparatively unimportant.
Hmmm. If you think what the source (Plover’s shitpost blog, not an email) provides is not beneficial, then I’d think the link should be to the original document.
I, on the other hand, think his selection and publication of this excerpt has merit and is useful. His framing of the quote is what drew me to read it in the first place.