Mary Jane's Place, Freshman Year, Column 4

Studying and the Modern Man  

"Life," he began with that certain look in his eye, "is really not worth living after one A.M., don't you agree?"

No one bothered to reply.  Two of the people in the room were learning through osmosis, a couple were studying the ceiling until they knew it like the back of their respective hands, and I was getting to know the back of my right hand.  It had been a long night, and there was one problem left.  One measly, lousy, lowly, utterly insignificant problem, with sharp, pointy, little teeth.

Luckily for us, George had been drinking coffee for seven hours now (black, utterly without cream or sugar), and thus was still at least slightly coherent.  He was staring intently at his book, scribbled furiously for a second or two, and then stared again.  Just when my right hand started to tell me about a night it had had in Winslow, Arizona some weeks back, I heard George, sitting straight up, shout very loudly, "Eureka!"

We stirred about a bit, of course, and some even stood up, but George's excitement was not particularly contagious.  George was shaking slightly from side to side (I thought it was the caffeine), and had the most insidious grin this side of Garfield smeared all over his face.

"What is it, George?" I asked, and was immediately sorry for having said anything.

"It's just so obvious!  I mean, it worked right, the very first time!  Come here, take a look!"

I crawled to my feet (quite a trick from the sitting position, wouldn't you say?) and went to where George had made this discovery of his.

"See?  See?  See!"  George began to shake even more rapidly.  "I just drew the free body diagram, resolved the forces, solved for some greek letters, and it worked!  See!"

I looked, and I actually became excited for just a moment, but then I saw his paper.  "You forgot to divide by two."

He looked down slowly.  "Oh yeah, I did ... but I can fix than, no problem!"

"You also forgot to take gravity into account, used the wrong formula, and the initial velocity of the Buick is in all likelihood not 0.97c."

George looked over his work carefully, and then looked back at me.  "Yeah, all right.  But other than that, what do you think?"

"I think it was a great effort, and you should definitely get some partial credit."

I'm not sure what it is about the two words "partial credit" that has such an effect upon people, but when I said, "partial credit," everyone in the room got up and started asking George how to do this last problem.  Everyone, that is, except Lennie.  Lennie was walking towards the door.

"Lennie!" I called after him hopefully.  "Did you get done?"

"Well, not exactly."

I looked at him blankly, which was not much of a chore at the time.  "How do you define 'not exactly?'"

"Well, I'm going to fake it in the morning.  I'll just look up the answer in the back and work from there."

"Lennie, the answer isn't in the back of the book."

He shrugged his shoulders at me aggressively.  "That's OK, I'll just multiply both sides of the equations by 0 and add the page number.  It'll be accurate to one significant digit.  Good night."

George's method began to sound better and better, but when I turned around, I noticed the whole group leaving.  "What happened?' I asked as ecstatically as I could manage.

"George went into caffeine withdrawal and is unconscious.  If you have nothing better to do, you could take him to Baxter for awhile."

"What?  Where are you going?"

"It's pizza time.  Wanna come?"

"Pizza?"  My mind was reeling at the though of such a concept.  "How can you think about pizza at a time like this?  Are we here at Mudd to stuff our faces with greasy pepperoni, or are we here to learn something?"

Even as I choked down the pepperoni that night, I knew I could never look a physicist or engineer in the eye without laughing as long as I lived, and I'm certainly glad that chemists and math majors don't do their homework that way.

[Editor's note:  Mary Jane is a Math major here at Mudd, and as such should be lynched by many engineers within a few days.  We're sorry for the inconvenience.]