… which will plug into two topics being developed in my posting queue (which is totally unmanageable in the face of recent events in my life and in the world): rich people, and the death in January of the Princeton philosopher Paul Benacerraf (who was my senior-year adviser in mathematics). I will have a lot more to say about both of these topics in future postings, but today I’ll just give you the zinger.
The scene. 1962, in PB’s office for a session laboring together, line by line, idea by idea, on my senior thesis. The phone rings. Paul is visibly angry, picks up the phone and barks into it, “I’m with a student”. Pause. Paul says, “Sell”, and adds “Never do this again. Never call me when I’m with a student”. (He treated his work with individual students, especially undergraduates, as a sacred commitment.)
Side note: Earlier, in the wonderful seminar on the philosophy of mathematics that caused me to ask him to be my adviser and to get the math department to accept him as such — the other two members of my committee were, incredibly, Alonzo Church and Ray Smullyan; I would have asked for Hilary Putnam as well, but he’d already left Princeton — I quickly figured out that Paul was Jewish, and then puzzled for some time over his clearly Arabic-based family name Benacerraf, until the obvious answer came to me: Sephardic Jews from North Africa. But the Jewish thing is crucial in what happened next.
Which was that Paul produced an apologetic smile, shrugged his shoulders in the gestural equivalent of the Yiddish nu? of resignation.
And explained: “I’m so sorry. That was my stockbroker. My family owns most of the oil in Venezuela“.
That, as it turns out, was a fact. And Paul was genuinely apologetic about it. (Paul was incredibly sharp and to the point, but also self-deprecatingly funny.)
If you know anything about the history of Venezuela, you know that the Benacerraf enterprises there didn’t last, but by then Paul and his older brother Baruj had enough socked away in investments to fund lives in which they could follow their passions and not run the family business. Paul was devoted to Princeton (he did a stint as provost of the university) and to his teaching and research there (I will post about this eventually; death notices are hard for me to do, especially for someone who was so important in my life). Baruj was bent on doing medical research, on immunology specifically; and so in 1980 he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for his work on histocompatibility genes.
I am not making this up. I’ll want to tell you a little more of Baruj’s story eventually, but now I just want to swear that all of this is true. You can look it up in Wikipedia.
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