This week we continue with my reminiscence of my college days at IUPUI studying computer science especially stories surrounding my mentor Dr. John Gersting and his wife Dr. Judith Gersting.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 64 of Contemplating Life.

This week we continue with my reminiscence of my college days at IUPUI studying computer science especially stories surrounding my mentor Dr. John Gersting and his wife Dr. Judith Gersting. I apologize in advance that this is going to be a long episode.

We now continue with my sixth semester at IUPUI. My transcript says I took MATH 361 “Advanced Calculus and Differential Equations”. By now the math was getting pretty hairy and I never really got a feel for calculus and differential equations. I snuck by with a “D”.

I also took Physics 342 “Modern Physics” which involved Einstein’s special and general relativity as well as quantum mechanics. While I enjoyed the lab portion of the class, I never could wrap my head around quantum mechanics. The more I learned about relativity, the less impressed I became with Einstein. He had such a pop-culture image of being this amazing genius but I learned that as is the case in all scientific pursuits, much of what he did was simply an extension of the work of people before him.

We learned about the famous Michelson-Morley experiment which proved that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant. As a consequence of that experiment, Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz derived the famous Lorenz Transformations which describe how time dilates and length changes as you approach the speed of light. I had always thought these derivations came from Einstein but they actually came from Lorentz as a result of Michelson and Morley.

The problem was, nobody understood the significance of those works. It took Einstein who had the courage to throw out a bunch of preconceived ideas of how physics worked to really understand the significance of these previous discoveries. Then that led him to develop both special and general relativity. So while I give him props for following the data where it led him despite the fact it blew up centuries of science before that, Einstein really didn’t do that much in my opinion.

Furthermore, as a third-year college physics student, I was expected to fully understand relativity. None of us in that class, especially me, could be described as a physics genius. Yet I came away with a pretty good understanding of relativity. Relativity is bizarre and counterintuitive but once someone figured it out, it does not take a genius to understand it. Just a well-educated college physics student.

I didn’t do so well when it came to quantum mechanics. The idea that something could be simultaneously a particle and a wave is something that physicists still can’t explain to this day. The problem I had was if it was a wave, what was the medium? Scientists used to believe there was something called ether. Electromagnetic waves were thought to be vibrations in this invisible medium. But Michelson and Morley proved that there is no ether.

I wanted to bring back the concept of ether. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of vibrating energy without the medium. Not only was I way off base, but in some ways, I was ahead of my time. I think I was on the verge of inventing string theory. String theory is the idea that all matter consists of vibrating strings of energy. String theorists don’t say what the strings are made of. So the problem persists. Whether it’s vibrating strings or electromagnetic waves, what exactly is the medium? What is it that is vibrating? No one can tell me. Although the origins of string theory date back to 1943, it wasn’t until around 1984 that physicists started getting excited when they began to believe that string theory could accurately model all of the elementary particles of the standard model of physics as well as the interaction between them.

Proponents of string theory have yet to produce anything useful. It seems to be the general consensus that there is no experiment you can do to prove string theory so although it had some interesting potential, it hasn’t fulfilled its promise. People who still work on the theory are often ridiculed by mainstream physicists.

Had I been better at math and physics, I might’ve gotten into the field of string theory and spent decades producing nothing useful. Fortunately for me, I was getting Ds in calculus and differential equations and I got so confused in this physics class that I ended up withdrawing from it. It’s the only class that I did not complete in college.

Somewhere along the way, the School of Science changed its basic requirements for a degree. They lowered some of the liberal arts requirements which I had already met. I don’t remember the details, but it was to my advantage to switch to the new curriculum. I think it saved me from a couple of liberal arts classes but I had to take a class in public speaking. I enjoyed it and earned a B. I could tell you more about that class but it wasn’t that interesting for our storytelling purposes.

We want to resume talking about my computer classes under my mentor Dr. John Gersting.

CS 461 “Programming 3” was the class I talked about last week in which Gersting told us we had to teach ourselves the course. The title of the book that he wrote was “Algorithmic Languages” and it was a brief survey of I believe 5 or 6 computer languages. There were a few introductory chapters, and then a chapter on each language. At the end of each chapter, there was a programming assignment, and as I mentioned before quizzes and tests that you had to pass 100% before you could go on.

The only deadline was that we had to complete the course by the end of the semester. He posted a chart outside his office that showed where everyone in the class was. A semester lasted 15 weeks. There was one guy who finished the entire course in about three weeks. We all considered him a show-off or a brown nose. All of the rest of us including me and my friend Rich went through the course at a leisurely rate. We would look at the chart and notice that we were all in approximately the same position. It didn’t occur to us until almost too late that we were not going to finish in time. Comparing ourselves to one another was a really bad idea because we were all doing terribly. More on that in a minute.

The book that Gersting wrote was a phenomenal reference book. We began referring to it as “The Bible” because it had all the answers. Then one day I said, “Actually, it’s not the entire Bible. It’s just ‘The Gospel According to John.’” I wrote that across the top of my book but I don’t know if Dr. John Gersting ever saw it.

There was one programming assignment where I got a D from Gersting. I don’t recall if it was in Programming 2 or Programming 3. I tried to raise a negative number to an exponent that was a floating-point number. For example, if you take 2 to the power of 2 that is just 2 squared which equals 4. Similarly, you can take -2 to the power of 2 and that also equals 4. No problem. Now suppose you take 9 to the power of 0.5. That’s just the square root so the answer is 3. But what if you try to take -9 to the power of 0.5 you can’t do that. Mathematically it’s undefined.

The compiler or the runtime system should’ve created an error but it didn’t. It gave an answer of -3. So essentially it took the square root of +9 and then just tacked on the minus sign.

I complained when he gave me a D. I said, “The compiler and the runtime system let me do it.” His response was, “If the guy who wrote the compiler was in my class I would have flunked him. But instead, you get a D. Are you still going to pass the class with one low grade on one project?”

“Yes.”

“Are you ever going to raise a negative number to a floating-point exponent again?”

“No.”

“Case closed. The D stands.”

The bottom line is, he was very tough but he was fair. I came up with an adage, “The only thing more difficult than a guy who thought he wrote the book on the subject was the guy who did write the book on the subject.”

Rich later amended that theory. He topped it when he went into an advanced math class and on the first day the teacher had them open up the textbook and read the acknowledgments page. The author thanked someone for proofreading the book and catching many errors. The proofreader was Rich’s math professor. So Rich said, “Worse than a guy who thinks he wrote the book on the subject and worse than the guy who did write the book on the subject is the guy who was so smart he could catch the mistakes in the guy who wrote the book on the subject.” He had me there.

One of the most significant events in my relationship with Dr. Gersting occurred one day when I went to his office to give him a progress report on my independent study project. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to report. I was lagging way behind on the project. Anyway, when I offered to fill him in on my progress, such as it was, he said he was on his way to the teachers’ lounge to eat dinner and invited me to sit with him and talk. It’s not like I was being let into some supersecret off-limits area. But it wasn’t somewhere that students normally went. I gave my report, such as it was, and then he started sort of rambling about the students in our class. I don’t remember the name of the student he was talking about. We will call him Joe.

“Did you notice Joe hasn’t been in class lately?” He noted.

“Yeah, now that you mention it. Is he sick?”

“No, he’s dropping out. His wife is expecting their first child. He was offered a position writing COBOL for an insurance company so he felt like he had to take it.” That type of job was considered sort of the bottom of the barrel for computer programmers–especially computer science majors. You could sense how disappointed he was. He stared into space for a moment and then continued. “My worry is he will never come back to complete his education. You’re fortunate that your education is being paid for because of your disability and you don’t have responsibilities distracting you from your education.”

I suddenly saw a completely different side of the man. He was so harsh on us because he wanted the best for us. I suddenly realized how deeply he cared for his students. He cared about their life and their career. And most of all he cared about me. He was thinking about my future.

I was struggling to complete the independent study project to create the operating system for our computer simulator. Furthermore, my Programming 3 class was not going well either. Part of the purpose of the course was to teach us self-discipline. In the real world, you only have one deadline. Finish the entire project on time. We kept looking at the chart thinking we were doing as well as everyone else but when it came down to the wire we were all in trouble.

By the way, Gersting once said, “I don’t think God created the world in six days. I think he thought about it for five days and then pulled an all-nighter.” I think being a procrastinator comes with the mentality of a programmer. We pulled lots of all-nighters to finish on time. That’s why I was so sympathetic to the gal who hired me to help her with her last-minute programming assignments that I talked about a couple of episodes ago.

The computer room was always packed in the final days of the semester and it was hard to find a free teletype machine to log in. I remember sitting there with Rich just a couple of hours before the final deadline. I barely got mine finished. Rich had his program working but he needed to print out a final copy. The teletype he was working on broke down. It would print but at the end of each line, it would not advance the paper. It just kept printing on top of the same text over and over again. You had to guess when it was going to do a carriage return and then crank the knob by hand. The result was a printout that went all over the page but at least you could read it. With just minutes to spare we rushed from the computer room in the A-Building to Gersting’s office in the K-Building. There was a line of students trying to turn things in at the last minute. I remember Gersting looking at Rich’s output and saying, “What the hell happened here?” Rich explained about the broken teletype. I don’t recall what grade he got but I think he did okay. I ended up with a “B”.

This semester was undoubtedly the most difficult semester that I had. In addition to this programming class, I had that independent study project with Dr. Gersting. I was supposed to write the operating system for the computer simulator we had worked on the previous year. I barely got the job done and wrote a ridiculously brief report. He easily could have failed me in class or given me an incomplete but he didn’t.

The pressure of having to drop a physics class, getting a poor grade in calculus, rushing to complete Programming 3, and doing a piss-poor job in my independent study class nearly led me to a nervous breakdown.

When I eventually graduated and got a full-time job, people asked me if it was going to be hard to work full-time. I said, “Hell no. 40 hours per week will be a piece of cake compared to what I’ve been through. College is a 24/7 endeavor. There’s always another chapter you could reread. There’s always another program you could’ve written better. There’s always another test you should cram for. Even if you think you’ve gotten everything done, you haven’t. The pressure is constant. Being able to walk away from a job at 5 PM each day and leave it behind me until the next a and to have my weekends completely free is going to be magnificent compared to what I’ve been through.”

The following semester, I had a class with Dr. John Gersting’s wife Dr. Judith Gersting. It was called “Discrete Computer Structures CS 482.” It wouldn’t be the first day in a class with a Dr. Gersting without me getting shrouded like Mr. Hart did by Prof. Kingsfield in “The Paper Chase.”

Before the first class began, one of my classmates and I were talking. “Hey Chris, how did that independent study project go with Dr. G.?”

“It was a disaster. I barely got any reasonable amount of work done. I ended up throwing together a report at the last minute and turning it in. He GAVE me a C for the course.” I put a strong emphasis on the word “gave”.

Then I heard a voice calmly declare, “It was a gift you know.”

I turned around to notice that Dr. Judith Gersting was standing at the front of the classroom. The comment came from her.

“What?” I said.

“It was a gift that he gave you a C.”

“I know that,” I muttered. “It was a gift.”

I did know it was a gift. He could’ve easily flunked me.

Inside I was freaking out. I had a new version for the worst teacher scenario. It’s not so bad when the teacher writes the book on the subject. It’s not even so bad when your teacher is so smart they can correct the mistakes of the guy who wrote the book on the subject. Worse than all of that is when you have teachers who are married to one another and you are the subject of conversation between them. My reputation was preceeding me and it wasn’t a good one.

In retrospect, it was arguably a positive thing. Mr. Dr. G. had my best interests at heart. He knew I’d done poorly but he wasn’t going to crash my GPA or have me come up short and not graduate on time. I probably deserved a D rather than an F because I did complete the work. But it was seriously substandard. The fact that he was willing to give me a break knowing that I would do better in the future was positive. Furthermore, the fact that he had communicated that to Mrs. Dr. G. was arguably also a positive. But it was hard to see that at the time. At that moment, I just felt like I had been shrouded by Mrs. Kingsfield.

The course was a highly advanced computing theory class in which we discussed things like Turing machines which were a hypothetical computer invented by computing pioneer Alan Turing. His life was chronicled in the 2014 film “The Imitation Game.” Turing was played by Benedict Cumberbatch. He was a mathematician who invented the machine that cracked the German enigma code and saved thousands of lives in World War II. Yet he was stripped of all of his honors for being a homosexual. He ended up killing himself.

I drew a cartoonish image of a Turing machine on the front of my notebook that caught the eye of Mrs. Dr. Gersting. She thought it was cute.

I will never forget the most challenging yet rewarding homework assignment that I had in my 4 and-one-half years of college. It simply said…

“Show that there are only two non-isomorphic groups of order four.”

Unless you had some advanced math and/or computability courses you are probably completely clueless about what that sentence means. At the time, so was I. And so were several of my classmates. Some of them were graduate students taking the class. For me, the course was CS 482 but for graduate students, it was called CS 582. The undergrads and grads took the course together.

Without going into a bunch of mathematics that is unimportant, let me give this summary. There is this mathematical concept called a “group”. It’s a way to take several objects as operators, perform some function upon them, and come out with an answer that is a member of that group. Rather than try to explain it here, I found a YouTube video that solves this exact question in almost precisely the way that I and my fellow students figured it out. It took us hours to do so but there was a phenomenal sense of satisfaction that we a taken such an obscure problem and managed to figure it out.

Given that I found so many web pages and YouTube videos attempting to answer the same question, it must still be a standard question for such courses today.

The question said, “Show that there are only two non-isomorphic groups of order four.”

It didn’t say prove it. Because you don’t prove it. It said “Show it” and we did. It’s not like proving a theorem. It’s something that simply is.

Some things are just true. You can demonstrate that they are true. Some things are false. You can demonstrate that. This led me to create what I called “Young’s Theorem.” The theorem states, “If it is, it is. If it isn’t, it isn’t. The proof is… Is it? Then it is. Is it not? Then it is not.”

It’s silly. I understand that. But it was my expression of my satisfaction that I took a wildly hypothetical, marginally useful, mathematical question and came up with an answer when my initial assessment was I had no idea what the fuck they were asking. And that led me to the understanding that for the most part, you can figure things out. True things are true. False things are false.

Well… Naturally, it’s more complicated than that. Later in the course, we learned that there is an entire class of problems that cannot be solved. It’s called computability theory. Some things simply cannot be solved by a computer. The primary example is you can’t write a computer program that will analyze another computer program to tell you definitively will that program will complete its task and stop. It’s sort of the mathematical equivalent of the question, “If God is all-powerful, can He create an object so massive that He can’t lift it?” If he can create such an object. Then He is not all-powerful because He can’t lift it. If He cannot create such an object, then He is not all-powerful.”

Years later this paradox led me to create a joke.

There are two kinds of people in the world and I can prove it.

There is one group of people that believes that there are two kinds of people in the world. There is another group of people who do not believe that there are two kinds of people in the world. So there. I just proved there are two kinds of people.

But because I proved it, there should no longer be people who do not believe that there are two kinds of people because I’ve given definitive proof that there definitively are two kinds of people. But once I’ve convinced everyone that there are two kinds of people. There are no longer two kinds of people. There are only people who do believe that there are two kinds of people because they accepted my proof.

But now, that is no longer true because everyone now believes that there are two kinds of people which means there’s only one kind of person– namely those that believe. But they are wrong.

And so on with infinite circular reasoning.

So who knows… In an alternate universe. I might have been a pioneer of string theory and solved the ultimate theory of everything. But I didn’t have sufficient math background to prove it and apparently, no one else does either or if they did, string theory would be widely accepted as the theory that explains all of physics.

Or I might have become famous for describing what is the worst kind of teacher to have when you are an insecure college student. (I vote that having 2 teachers married to each other is still the worst.)

Or people could have bought into my ridiculous Young’s Theorem that true is true and false is false no matter how trivial that observation is. That would be particularly useful these days when our political discourse includes ridiculous phrases such as “alternate facts”.

That’s the kind of insanity that arises when you are overwhelmed as a college student. Fortunately, I had the Gerstings guiding me through that insanity and somehow I came out on the other end okay.

We are going to go off-topic next week to celebrate my history as a fan of motorsports because we are coming up on the month of May in Indianapolis which is the time of the Indy 500. After that, we are going to return to my college stories and eventually, the Gerstings will play a big role in those stories as well. I don’t want to skip ahead and tell those stories now. I will tell them in chronological order with the other events of my life at that time.

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I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.