When I was in Russia last week, I saw my academic brother Dmitriy. There, we met Herbert’s new student and postdoc.
When I met the new student, Mabel, at the hotel, I said: “you must be Mabel, nice to finally meet you.” I say this because Herbert told me about his new student from Cuba last time I saw him. Her response was, “we’ve met before, at CTIC 2009, remember? We even shared a bed together.” And yes, she was correct … she was at the conference and shared a bed with me. How embarrassing. She was kind enough not to hate me for forgetting her though.
On the way to lunch one day, Stefan (Herbert’s new postdoc) asks Dmitriy who his adviser was. We didn’t believe that he did not know, until we realized that he did not know who my adviser was either. Then, we ask Stefan which of Herbert’s former students he actually knew. The only two he could list were Olga and Michael (current / former postdocs of Herbert). This explains why Stefan thought I did not know what a Möbius strip was when he made a bad joke the first day. [[ The joke was: “Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?” I thought, how do you CROSS a Möbius strip? I didn’t even listen to his answer, as I knew it would be “to get to the same side”. I was pondering the logistics of crossing a Möbius strip. Then, I figured out that it must be embedded on a Klein bottle. I did not find it funny, especially since it took me so long to make sense of, but he started to tell me where I can read about Möbius strips since I was not laughing. Later, we disagreed on my interpretation of the joke. ]]
Brittany's Blog 