What's fun in math

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There was something I've wanted mathematicians to take a stab at for many years, and it has finally been done, though the maths is beyond me: i.e. to see if the universe could actually have come from nothing (apparently it could have). First you have to decide what "nothing" is or isn't of course. My hunch was very crude and by way of analogy:

0 = +1 + -1

So from this type of nothing, there is now something and anti-something.

Could the grand total of everything in the universe actually be "nothing" ?

I have a built-in bias against graph theory.

The one graph theorist I know was a real sob.

One semester as a grad student, I was assigned to do his recitation sections. The first recitation section was on a Monday morning while the first class met that afternoon. I had absolutely nothing to talk about it. Even though the sections were supposed to last for fifty minutes, I turned them loose after half an hour. A few minutes after I left, the graph theorist walked in, saw that the classroom was empty, and stormed up to the math department office and tried to get me fired. Fortunately, they just told him to calm down.

For some bizarre reason, he required me to show up to his class! He told me that I had to show up but I could work on something else during the class. Then, during class, he would get ticked off at me for not paying any attention to him.

One woman I knew was working on her doctorate in graph theory. The department had a set of qualifiers that each PhD student had to pass in order to continue their studies. When a student failed one of the qualifiers, they had precisely one opportunity to try again and it had to be the very next time they were offered. On the second try, the students only had to take those that they failed the first time. Very few students passed all of them the first setting. The subjects were topology, algebra, real analysis, and complex analysis but a student could request a topic of their choice to replace one of the others.

Of course, the woman asked that graph theory replace one of the other topics. Her prof made up that qualifier for her and made it far more difficult than normal. Then when he graded it, he was merciless in the grading. Even the smallest mistake on a problem resulted in an enormous penalty. The only way to pass that exam would have been to do everything perfectly. Even then, I think he would have found some reason to take points off. Needless to say, she flunked the exam. It ended up destroying any chance of her earning a doctorate there and she spent the rest of her life teaching introductory math classes at a small college.

There was one funny story about him. While I was a grad student, the math department moved into a new building. For the first time, the math department had a building all to itself. When we were getting ready to move, the math department office sent out a questionaire to all the faculty asking about their preferences for their offices. Most of the faculty asked for things like a corner office. Some asked for offices near other colleagues who they worked with a lot. One particular prof who earned his PhD at Princeton had only one request -- he didn't want an office near any graph theorists. That got around really quick and everyone had a good laugh since there was only the one graph theorist in the entire department.

So in my mind, I tend to associate graph theory with the bozo professor from hell and have had no desire to learn anything about graph theory ever since.