People I've Met

Sabás Cervantes, Vinod Janghiani, Richard Stallman, and Grisha Perelman.

I am not close to any of them. During my life I have had activities close to them. Some more some much less. All of them, in my mind share similar traits. I write a few things about them.

Sabás was Jerzy Plebanski's student at Cinvestav, while I was on a sabbatical there. He was pleasant. Later he went away and, even though, he was a good student, he is not working in General Relativity as far as I know.

My friends told me that he did not want to collect his salary when he became a professor, because, according to him, Mexican workers and peasants deserved more salary than he was paid. His sister eventually came and collected the money.

Vinod was my classmate at the Physics Department of UCSB, he was Jim Hartle's Ph.D. student. When a friend of us got a job in Sussex, he took it upon himself to write a letter to the effect that our friend was not trustworthy. When the Faculty committee formed to address this harmful behavior, he wanted me to attest, that our friend did not show up once we were to have pizza together.

Now Vinod, I am told, walks around the streets of Santa Barbara and does not have a faculty position.

Stallman only answered some e-mails to me when we wanted him to lecture us in open source at Lucent. He said that since we worked for pay, he wanted an honorarium. The Software Administration Department hosting the event did not pay speakers more than travel and hotel expenses, then Stallman did not come. Eventually Eric Raymond talked to us.

Now Stallman does not want money for Emacs, and other open source products that form the basis for Linux.

Finally Grisha was not interested to talk to anybody about his mathematical work. I asked a friend of mine to invite him to Mexico; my friend told me that Perelman did not want to talk to anybody.

This week finally Grisha decided to turn down one million dollars offered to him, because he thought that Richard Hamilton deserved more recognition.

The pattern I see is one of brilliant minds that do not see the world like the rest of us. Maybe they are autistic, maybe we don't get the point about life. In any case, I wished I was offered part of the money that all these brilliant men deserve.

I myself, could have taken more money than I had. Maybe I am borderline autistic.