An Imposter Physics Professor with a "Compulsion to Teach"

The case of former physics professor Marvin Hewitt is a weird one.

Quoting the Wikipedia entry: Marvin Hewitt (born 1922) was an American impostor who became, among other things, a university physics professor.

Hewitt was a high school drop-out with no qualifications who wanted to become an academic.[1] He always used names and identities of real-life people in his impostures. He later claimed that he had a "compulsion to teach".

This reminds me of the fictitious movie critic David Manning. (And, of course, there is the story of Sidd Finch.)

(Tips of the cap to MathFeed and Boing Boing.)

Academics Write Like Crap

Well, at least most of us write like crap for our academic writing. Additionally, most of us don't include humor in our scientific articles either.

I do the best I can to buck this trend, though others will be the judge of how well I do. I certainly attempt to put humor in some of my writing, and quite a few of my papers (e.g., this one) contain easter eggs. I do think that I am a good writer, and at minimum I am definitely very anal about my scholarly prose.

Although I don't agree with everything in the article about what we do that is bad --- for example, I think the paragraph with "The rest of this article is organized as follows." is genuinely useful for many readers, especially if the article is long --- but I agree with a lot of it. Also, I can't overemphasize how much my scientific career has benefited from my experience in journalism at Caltech. (Yes, being a Tech Editor has been amazingly beneficial. It's one of the best and most important things I did for my education.)

(Tip of the cap to Carlos Castillo Chavez.)

"In Your Copious Free Time"

I e-mailed Somerville's new mathematics freshers for the first time today, so it was time to introduce them to important phrases --- such as "in your copious free time". (I heard this in the past from people like Mark Newman and Barry Simon, and I am sure that its use in academia far predates the latter.)

Didn't you know? Free time at Oxford is always "copious".

Update (9/10/13): I was listening to Tom Lehrer yesterday, and he uses this exact phrase in the same snarky way. I wouldn't be surprised at all if that is a common origin for how many of us started using it. (It occurs in the introduction to the song "It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier.")