## 如何假装听懂一次讲座并威震全场

Desmond MacHale (1946- ) is a well-known mathematical wit, author of the book [MACH]. He has reported in this way on his experience at a colloquium:

Recently, I attended a mathematical lecture given by a guest speaker where absolutely nobody, except possibly the speaker, had the remotest idea what was going on…. After the speaker had finished over an hour later to an enthusiastic round of applause, the chairman asked for questions and, of course, there was a deathly and highly embarrassing silence. Then and there I resolved to put together a collection of universal questions for use in such situations…. The following is the list I came up with.

1. Can you produce a series of counterexamples to show that if any of the conditions of the main theorem are dropped or weakened, then the theorem no longer holds?
2. What inadequacies of the classical treatment of this subject are now becoming obvious?
3. Can your results be unified and generalized by expressing them in the language of Category Theory?
4. Isn’t there a suggestion of Theorem 3 in an early paper of Gauss?
5. Isn’t the constant $4.15$ in Theorem 2 suspiciously close to $4\pi/3$?
6. I’m not sure I understand the proof of Lemma 3—could you outline it for us again?
7. Are you familiar with a joint paper of Besovik and Bombialdi which might explain why the converse of Theorem 5 is false without further assumptions?
8. Why not get a graduate student to perform the horrendous calculations mentioned in Theorem 1 in the case $n=4$?
9. Could you draw us a simple diagram to show what the situation looks like for $n=2$?
10. What textbook would you recommend for someone who wishes to get students interested in this area?
11. When can we expect your definitive textbook on this subject?
12. Why do you think there was such a flurry of activity in this area around the turn of the century and then nothing until your paper of 1979?
13. What are the applications of these results?

And if that won’t stop most any speaker cold, then I don’t know what will

Publié le par v dans «Misc». Mots-clés: Academia