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The Greeks had their symposia, where intellectuals of the day would gather and discuss philosophy. The French, during the Enlightenment, did the same over coffee in their salons. In modern America? We’re desperately outmatched.
At least I am. I took in a graduate thesis seminar today at UMD (free and open to the public!) and realized that if the Enlightenment were to happen today, I’d be—at best—the guy pouring the coffee. Today’s presentation started as a lecture and became a sort of postmodern theatre—a dark, absurdist journey into a realm where nothing made sense.
It started off well. The presenter was my brother, and he chose the promising-sounding topic “Magic Boxes and Related Topics.” After a childhood engrossed in fantasy novels, I felt pretty comfortable with the concept. Presumably, a magic box would give the possessor a +2 on their Will checks when casting spells, or something like that. As the room filled up with other mathematics graduate students, I began to understand why my brother had chosen to add Chinese to his repertoire of languages.
Today, his talk began in English. Unfortunately, that only lasted a minute or two. As he started switching between slides, his speech devolved into complete gibberish:
“In case the hypercube also sum when all the numbers are raised to the power p one gets p-multimagic hypercubes. The above qualifiers are simply prepended onto the p-multimagic qualifier. This defines qualifications as {r-agonal 2-magic}. Here also ‘2-’ is usually replaced by ‘bi,’ ‘3-’ by ‘tri,’ etc. (‘1-magic’ would be ‘monomagic,’ but ‘mono’ is usually omitted). The sum for p-Multimagic hypercubes can be found by using Faulhaber’s formula and divide it by mn-1.” (Wikipedia. This isn’t what he said, but close enough.)
Franz Kafka would have been inspired by what happened next. My brother began a fluid, energetic discourse, slide after slide with nothing connected to the reality I knew. More frightening, the room was filled with listeners staring ahead in rapt attention. Each of these students understood in full. I was walled off from this strange world, so close to our own and yet so far. This was beginning to look a lot like an experimental theatre performance.
A heavyset, average-looking guy with a maroon UMD hoodie casually raised a hand. If I had to venture into literary theory, I’d say he symbolized the Everyman in this play.
“At the very end you mentioned two sides,” he said. “Did you look at any with two sides?”
My brother smiled. “I thought about that, but that would be a magic box.”
An older man spoke up. With a mustache, a receding hairline, and a jacket that was actually tweed, it was clear he was The Professor. He was probably playing some sort of a Greek choir role, if my “experimental theatre” theory holds.
“A two-dimensional structure, if you slice it anywhere vertically and unfold it,” he said. “It’s just a magic rectangle.”
Ok, so that wasn’t very enlightening. Maybe this was a Dadaist play. A small, unimposing young man with jeans and a hoodie, glasses, and blonde hair spoke up with an Eastern European accent.
“Well, not really,” he said.  Mephistopheles! The tempter. I think he was subverting the professor’s authority and in turn questioning the moral structure of the age.
“You need the sum through it,” he continued seditiously. “When you take the hollow box you don’t care about [that dimension].”
Instead of a dramatic cymbal clash or wailing, though, The Professor just agreed.
“It’s a magic rectangle with an additional property, maybe,” he said.
It was a very strange play. These little one-acts are performed several times every year at UMD, are called “Thesis Defense Seminars,” and are free and open to the public. (Call 218-726-8747 if you’d like to check one out for math.)
My brother still maintains the whole thing was real. It’s great that he can hold character that well, but I have my doubts.