In grad school I lived at International House for 1 1/2 years, where the math students would usually try to sit at the same table. When there were sufficiently many of us at one table as compared with students in other fields, the conversation inevitably turned to our common field of interest; when this happened we termed it "critical math". We eventually classified all math into two categories: gooey and crunchy. This was a question of continuous vs. discrete math, but probably analysts are gooey and algebraists are gooey. (Not sure about people who study Lie groups.) We tried to figure out correlations between gooey/crunchy and other behaviors, but nothing ever seemed backed up by evidence. Finally this corn-eating thing accomplishes this long-sought goal! Fascinating. --Dan << Are you an analyst or an algebraist? If you're presented with a delicious butter-dripping corn cob to eat, how do you eat it? According to http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2010/08/analysis-vs-algebra-predicts-eating.htm... your answers to these two questions are strongly correlated. For what it's worth, the alleged correlation works in my case; what about other munsters?
_____________________________________________________________________ "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi." --Peter Schickele