Congratulations to Dr. Julius Su!

This afternoon, I went to the Ph.D. thesis defense of Julius Su '98 '99 (yes, Julius has two BS degrees from Caltech... physics was easy for him, but he needed the extra year to satisfy all the requirements for the biology major), who I originally met my frosh year during Rotation.

I don't have that many friends that I met during my frosh year Rotation, and there is naturally the tendency to stop talking to each other that much if people end up in different Houses simply because of inertia. But Julius and I continued to hang out even though I got into Lloyd and he was a Flem. (Julius has the distinction of being the Flem I have counted the most often. I don't know if there was a second Flem in the room while he defended his thesis.)

Julius's thesis was on computational chemistry and one of the class papers he cited was by Rick Heller, a bigshot in quantum chaos (so I've read a lot of Heller's papers). So there actually is a small overlap in scientific interests, though Julius was concerned (and only as background reading, so not overly concerned) with a somewhat different aspect of Heller's work.

I used to collaborate on Chem 41 and (to a lesser extent) Math 2 with Julius. (We were among the only frosh in those classes.) When I was a frosh, Julius would drop by Lloyd to talk about that stuff, although almost every conversation would begin with his bragging about the new capacitor he had found and how he would use it to zap people as they tried to open their doors. (Julius made good use of hyperspace...) This story is told in Legends III.

While the capacitor story is my favorite Julius story, there are a few other amusing ones. The 'Guess a number' story (which occurred sophomore year during prefrosh weekend), which I can't explain very easily without telling the whole story, is a web-only story in Legends III. There is another story, that will not be appearing in that book, about when Julius ran out of toilet paper in his 150 Chester apaprtments. (He ended up smuggling some out of the bathrooms in East Bridge.) I might have a few other Julius stories, but they aren't occurring to me at the moment. There is another Julius story that has been told to me -- it involves a certain stuffed turtle -- that might make it into Legends IV. I should also mention that Julius has a few Mason stories from way back in the day (especially from when I was a frosh), though there was one that he had been inadvertently attributing to someone else for many years before I corrected him. (It involves certain messages from TAs that I got on one of my Chem 41 assignments. I think all O(10) TAs in the class ended up signing their names below the statement in a tremendous show of unanimity. I need to hunt down these notes...)

Also, there were several amusing comments during the thesis defense. I tried to convey them to Lemming but failed miserably, so I won't try to convey them here.