Mad Professors

In my first year as a student in Edinburgh, I took courses in mathematics and computer science. The last computer science lecture in first year was always a tour de force given by the charismatic Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Sidney Michaelson. Prof Michaelson was a pioneer of mainframe computing, known as a great character, and held in great affection as a sympathetic colleague and mentor. He was slightly portly and had a great big grey beard. He looked like Santa Claus’s grandfather.

His daughter Rosabel was in the year above me, also studying mathematics. As I recall, she was clever, confident, left-wing and attractive (but quite a scruffy and in-your-face dresser). I suspect in common with other male mathematics undergraduates, I thought she was wonderful but was also a bit scared of her.

But back to her dad and the final computer science lecture of the academic year, in May 1975. Prof Michaelson gave us a glimpse into the future. His essential message was that in the near future, information science would make it much easier for your activities and habits to be kept under surveillance. An example he gave went as follows: in a decade or so, when you go to the supermarket, they won’t add up the prices on a cash register, they will run your purchases past a reading machine and an internal computer will add up the total. You will probably pay with a card rather than cash. And this means that there will be a record in the computer of what you bought and when you bought it, and someone can know where you were and what you were buying.

He gave some other examples. We listened respectfully and with interest, as he was a terrific communicator and had great style, but afterwards we were sceptical. Pie in the sky, we thought. Eighteen years old, we knew it all.

Everything that Sidney Michaelson predicted came true. My cohort of teenage smartarses was wrong.

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Another great Edinburgh character was the professor of Projective Geometry, Prof WL Edge. He was my maths tutor in first year, and had taught my elder brother, who was now a lecturer in the statistics department, so he seemed to keep special tabs on me. He was about eight feet tall (or so it seemed to me), very old, and outside of mathematics talked a lot of nonsense. He had a picture of himself as a student in Trinity College Dublin, standing beneath the statue of the 19^th century geometer George Salmon, and he would point it out with pride, saying, ‘That’s me, you know. Nineteen thirteen’, or some similarly distant bygone date.

He looked an imposing figure as he stumped about central Edinburgh with his shock of grey hair and his walking stick. One day, I was walking along the South Bridge with my little pals, and I saw Prof Edge approaching. Oh no, I thought, he’ll want to chew the fat with me and it will amuse my mates no end. So I concealed myself in a shop doorway.

Unfortunately, Prof Edge had seen this, and he marched up to me, poked me in the chest with his walking stick and enquired, ‘Are we not on speaking terms, then, you and I?’

This occasioned considerable merriment in my coterie of friends, who stood on the pavement choking with laughter.

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Maurice Quenouille was the head of statistics at Marischal College, Aberdeen in the 1950’s, and later professor of statistics at Southampton. I never knew him, as he died tragically in the early 1970’s. However, I have some retrospective affection for him because he wrote a statistics textbook, Introductory Statistics, which, uniquely, you don’t have to be a tormented genius to understand.

My former boss Julian Besag used to say that Maurice Quenouille had been treated badly by colleagues and employers over the years because he was gay. That may be the case, but he was in any case an idiosyncratic chap, whose behaviour might also have had something to do with his treatment at work. There is a story that during his time at Southampton, he once sat in the front row of the lecture theatre, listening to a seminar presented by a distinguished visiting professor from the USA. During the course of the lecture, Prof Quenouille took out his nail clippers and trimmed his fingernails. He then, in full view of the visiting speaker, took off his shoes and socks and cut his toenails. I really hope this story is true.

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All of the professors mentioned above, however eccentric in appearance or behaviour, were in possession of formidable intellects. However, you don’t have to be that clever to be a professor. When I got my chair, as they call it, I was ever so proud, but I had no illusions about my mental abilities, and the following episode illustrates why.

A few years ago, Linda bought me a set of binoculars for my birthday, so that I can spy on the neighbours. On the morning of my birthday, I took them back to the shop, as they didn’t seem to be working properly. The man in the shop pointed out that I was looking through the wrong end.

Note to self: with modern binoculars, you look through the big end.