Date: 2008-05-13 15:17 Subject: Coincidences Security: Public

I live near a used book store in the Mission, Dog-Eared Books. In the window, they have little hand-drawn obituaries for various people, mostly famous writers and revolutionaries. I really like them and usually read one or two when I walk by.

A couple of weeks ago, I stopped to read one and realized that it was not about a famous writer or a revolutionary. It was for one of my college math professors, Dr. Curtis Barefoot.



Dr. Barefoot taught me how to prove theorems; I remember in particular that proof by induction was kicking my ass until he sat down and explained to me that I could only change one side of the equation at a time. I remember spending a great summer competing with a friend to get the highest grade in his combinatorics class (I won by .01 percent).

San Francisco is full of coincidences and chance meetings, but so far this is the least explicable.

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Date: 2008-05-13 22:33 Subject: Asking for it Security: Public

In my post about Dr. Barefoot, I forgot to mention another cool thing he did. In my senior year of college, I decided that I wanted to go to a mathematics conference in San Antonio, Texas. In some sort of fit of optimism not to be repeated until years later, I asked the math department head, Dr. Barefoot, if the department would pay for it. (Obviously, I couldn't afford it.) He said yes! I went and it was marvelous and wondrous and completely over my head.

Which reminds me that I updated HOWTO Negotiate Your Salary and Benefits - for Women and the now defunct Val Henson Women in Computing Book Scholarship to reference Ask for It, the new book on negotiating techniques for women. The most important technique is to realize that you can ask for something at all. Happy asking!

Note: If you are planning to post something about how as a man, you are not good at asking either, or that men also need to get better at asking, I'd just like to let you know in advance that you are completely missing the point. Cheers!