During Junior year, a bunch of us took Joel Franklin's AMa 153 course on stochastic processes (especially during the first term, which could be used to satisfy Caltech's probability and statistics requirement). I also took Joel Franklin's linear programming course during my senior year.
Let's start with a story from Steve Van Hooser: "We'll start with the best story. Steven Michael, going through his material at the end of the term, found a homework set for Stochastic Processes that he forgot to turn in. He went to Franklin's office, and described his mistake. Franklin merely said: "Well..did you do it?" And Steven said yes. "Well...is it right?" And Steven said he thought so. So Franklin wrote a handwritten message to the registrar saying something to the effect of "Dear Judith [Goodstein], please change Steven's grade in AMa153 to an A. -J.N. Franklin". And that was that."
We invited Joel Franklin as a dinner guest in Lloyd House a couple of times, and Steve recounted a couple of those in his Facebook post.
Additionally, in Legends of Caltech III, we included a story filled with quotes from Joel Franklin. They give a good idea of the Joel Franklin experience, and this compilation from Jason Kastner (which I remember finding on his website at some point) inspired me to compile quotations from other professors who uttered many witticisms. Here is a version of the story from a .pdf of a pageproof version of the book. (I am pretty sure the typo in "the Navy way" definition was corrected before the final version.)
When I was in graduate school, I suggested Joel Franklin's book Methods of Mathematical Economics for the SIAM "Classics in Applied Mathematics" series, and thankfully that worked out. (Franklin originally published it with Springer, but there was some sort of falling out, and for a while the only way to get a "new" copy was as printed notes.)
In his honor, today we should all do something in "the Navy way".
(Tip of the cap to Steve Van Hooser, who was part of our AMa 153 contingent.)
Dr. Franklin was my grandfather, but I knew very little about how his students and colleagues experienced him, so this was a real treat. Thank you so much, Dr. Porter!
ReplyDeleteMy pleasure, Ben!
ReplyDeleteSeveral of my friends and I had him as a professor, and we really liked and appreciated him, including inviting him to dinner twice at our undergraduate House so that our friends could interact with him.
Your mother e-mailed me, so I'll copy-and-paste some quotes from Facebook and call her up later (another day, as I am recovering from an international flight right now) with some more notes.
The quotes come from a book (Legends of Caltech III) that I co-edited with fellow alum Autumn Looijen. I remembered Professor Franklin's quotes very fondly and wanted to include a story about it in the book.