Derelict of the Year 2011
And The Winners Are:
1st place: Gleb 'Motherfunkin' Zhelezov2nd place: Erik Davis
Congratulations to all the winners and thanks to everyone for voting!
Party Info
Nominations
- Gleb 'Motherfunkin' Zhelezov
- Gleb Zhelezov (Again)
- Erik Davis
- Erik Davis (Again)
- Erik Davis (Appendix)
- Aalok 'The Parked Car Hit Me' Shah
- Ian Goldstein
- Martin Leslie
- Leo Maloney
- The First Year Applied Math Class
- Victor Piercey
- Michael Gilbert
- m225 Printer
- Dan "Daft Punk" Champion
- The 2011 DOTY Committee
- The 2011 DOTY Committee (Again)
- The 2011 DOTY Committee (And again)
Gleb 'Motherfunkin' Zhelezov
Awww yeah, let me hit you with some wisdom.
The year was 1988 and the world was ripe for a revolution. George H.W. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan as supreme commander of the free world. Rick Astley's hit single "Never Gonna Give You Up" was unironically topping the charts. Geraldo Rivera got punched in the nose. And out of this darkness shone a brilliant light.
I'm talking about Gleb 'Motherfunkin' Zhelezov, a man whose Funk is so extraordinary that it makes George Clinton look like Chelsae Clinton. A celestial being whose Funk is so cosmic it makes Bootsy Collins look like Phil Collins. A starchild whose Funk is so... well, Rick James is no longer with us, so that's that.
Now, some of you may accuse me of being hyperbolic. You may even think to yourself, "Funk is dead. I listen to indie rock; Funk's power holds no sway over me." Wrong.
It's like main man Bill S. said:
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Specifically, Funk."
Gleb had a dream. A dream that each man, woman, and child would have love in their hearts and Funk in their soul. And he was sending out vibrations to be picked up by the Mothership, so that one day the Funk might return.
Now, you must be a fool if you think that this would jive with the powers-that-be. The first thing The Man did after eating that damn apple was make Funk a crime. And sure enough, it wasn't long before the Department of Homeland Security discovered a tumor growing wildly in the heart of America. That tumor was Gleb, and they weren't having none of that.
So, they did what any Funk-hating bureaucracy would do. They exiled our beloved Gleb, sending him to live out his days in a Belarusian gulag. Like Superman in the Phantom Zone, he is forced to bide his time until the Funk may one day rise again. The Arizona mathematics department suffered a tremendous loss on that fateful day; but tragedy has the potential to bring out the best in us all. Just promise me this. Promise me that you won't forget his story.
-------
Well, if I were to write a book, that's what it would be about. But truth be told, Gleb was forced to leave the country for having his visa out of status, and now lives with his mother in that frozen wasteland that is Belarus. He routinely stays up all night long linking me P-funk videos on youtube and trolling facebook. To quote a fellow first year student, "I really miss Gleb. It was nice having someone around who was always further behind on the homework than me." I'd like to be the first to nominate Gleb for DOTY, although perhaps it is the U.S. State Department that should get credit for noticing his dereliction.
Gleb Zhelezov (Again)
Gleb is DOTY; he missed spring semester due to an expired visa. Nobody else should get serious consideration.
Erik Davis
There once was a first year named Erik,
Who loved sending emails hysteric.
Comprised of parties and beer,
Famous trees far and near.
Alas, they were not esoteric.
Erik Davis (Again)
We hereby recognize the dereliction of Mr. Davis in encouraging us all to learn how to use our spam filters.
Erik Davis (Appendix)
I request that these should be added to Eric's Nomination.
Alternatively, I will be giving FREE massages at the next happy hour. ~ April 26th.
I would like to extend a cordial invitation to participate in the First Annual University of Arizona Math/Applied Math/Stat Interdisciplinary Beer Mile (FAUAMAMSIBM, if you are fond of keeping your incoherent mumbles brief).
So, because it is most certainly the case that Austin and Patrick will spend most of their respective winter breaks either running windsprints or slamming malt liquor, I felt obliged to inform the rest of you as far ahead of time as I could, in the sake of fairness. ~ Dec 10
In a last ditch effort to avoid doing my Algebra homework (successful, might I add), I have spent the last two hours thinking about how awesome trees are. As many of you either have classes or your office located conveniently above the UA Laboratory of Tree Ring Research I thought perhaps I should share some thoughts with you:
I realise that last one might be a bit depressing to some of you. Here's a happy tree to cheer you up. He's playing an accordion: http://i.imgur.com/2s9Vm.jpg
Aalok 'The Parked Car Hit Me' Shah
After another successful recruitment workshop Aalok was cruising down Campbell avenue blasting Backstreet Boys on his way to drop off the 15 passenger UA van. He pulls the van into the sparse motor pool parking lot. Aalok, being a go getter and always challenging himself, decides to try to squeeze the van between the only two other cars in the lot. After a few tense moments, he successfully parks the van and screams "like a glove!"
A few hours later Aalok gets a call from Stacey informing him that he had left a 2 ft gash in the side of the car he parked next to. The rest of Aalok's day was spent in conversation with UA Risk Management.
Ian Goldstein
Never have so many trigonometry students waited on the couch as the man they were here to visit spoke to their classmates. Yet, their time in limbo was not of their own doing. All the inquisitors of angular knowledge arrived at the time this man requested them to visit, i.e. office hours. It was he whose arrival was tardy or attendance completely lacking.
Ian Goldstein has been late or missed numerous office hours and personal appointements with students throughout this academic year. His excuse, the bus from star pass was late or he slept through the last time the bus could make it to campus on time or simply...eh they'll live.
While he might not deserve the crown, Ian is at least the jester of the crown's court.
Martin Leslie
Years come and years pass. Calls for DOTY nominations come and go. Every year I read nominations written by overly-excited first year students about those who have shown their dereliction with flash and pomp. I won't deny that Gleb certainly wears the derelict belt proudly, but this year I would like to nominate one of the ultimate derelicts I have ever known. I am talking about a man who has taken dereliction and made it into a lifestyle. This man sweats apathy and breathes ambivalence. For four years he has been one of the ultimate unsung heroes of dereliction, right up there with the God-like Casey Warmbrand. Who is this mystery man that I speak of? None other than the red-headed Australian stepchild of the UA math department: Martlin Leslie.
In between bouts of eating, sleeping, and drinking copious amounts of beer, Martin can occasionally be found in MTL 120 watching hulu on his laptop, sitting on top of his dereliction throne and falling asleep. He is known to spend days on end at home, in his underwear, watching season after season after season of Law and Order. Upon being asked to have lunch with the prospective first year students, Martin told me, "This is why they should never ask me to come to these things. I just don't care. I'll tell them not to come."
When you hand in your votes for DOTY, you can follow the masses and vote for the flashy "half-derelicts," or you can honor the name of the Derelict of the Year and vote for a man who is the very essence of dereliction itself. Vote for a man who has been doing this for years without recognition due to his brilliant lack of pomp and getting kicked out. Vote for a true derelict. When you turn in that vote, close your eyes and imagine the visage of Martin Leslie. Just look at him. I mean, seriously. Do it. He is Derelict of the Year. Vote for him, or waste your vote on yet another pretender.
Leo Maloney
It was a Thursday evening. Leo Maloney was studying Geometry in his office, well into the wee hours of the morning. Correction: he was studying the wonders and joys of Fourth Avenue until well after three. Realizing how late it was and that he had a class to teach at 8am, Leo decided it was time to catch a few winks. Should he try to go home? Alas, his bicycle was broken. Rather than walk 5 miles there and back, Leo attempted to sleep on the small blue bench in his office. After being awakened by the cleaning crew, he decided that he appeared too much like a homeless graduate student. To lend some legitimacy to sleeping in his office, he moved to his desk, opened his Algebra book to a comfortable page, and fell asleep again.
Huzzah to Leo for achieving dereliction within the first three weeks of graduate school!
The First Year Applied Math Class
I hereby nominate the entire First Year Applied Class as DOTY, for completely taking over 401 and 224. Apparently, due to budget cuts, the math department was unable to issue any of them offices...
Victor Piercey
I nominate Victor Piercey for dereliction of good sense via his attempt to categorify probability theory in real time in the middle of Tom Kennedy's discrete stochastic processes class. It is debatable whether this is even a good idea (see here for a related discussion) but it certainly may not have been appreciated by the majority of the class made up of applied math and even out-of-department students who wouldn't know a functor from a hole in the ground.
Some highlights of Victor's program (plus other amusement):
- Claiming that the pi-lambda theorem was just a restatement of some universal property or other. Then one of our main existence theorem was just some trivial extension of that. Tom reminded Victor that we had to actually prove that things were martingales or Markov chains or whatever so it couldn't all just be abstract nonsense.
- Saying that convolution was just a kind of multiplication. Minutes later we saw an equation that had both convolution and multiplication which caused Victor to realize that perhaps there was a reason to think of them as being different.
- Victor's amusingly folksy vocabulary: "Can we make any hay with this?"
- Victor's happiness when we used some simple identities in class: he could be heard to pipe up something about how we were doing algebra.
- Victor used his newfound knowledge in the grad colloquium to diagnose the financial ills of this country by proving the discrete Black-Scholes formula. This of course led quickly to a political diatribe which seemed a little lacking in rigorous proof.
Michael Gilbert
My nomination for Michael Gilbert was originally going to read: "for acts too unspeakable to record".
But then I remembered some things I could talk about. After Spring break the first time he showed his face in the department was on the Thursday, when he turned up late to class and then immediately went home afterwards. How we would tell me that he'd spent all day playing Civ 5 and had beaten it on the hardest level. Or reading enormous fantasy novel series consecutively. Or the time he played his guitar for 2 days straight instead of coming to school, forming horrible blisters on his fingers, then said that his friend who was living in Thailand* was going to move to Tucson to start a band with him.
*without denigrating the lovely people I know from Thailand, this doesn't fill me with the greatest faith in Michael's friend.
I also heard rumors that his advisor had threatened him with DOTY nomination when he didn't turn up to meetings. That's got to count for something, right?
So this is for Michael Gilbert, who doesn't let the fact that he's in grad school deter him from spending all his time on whatever his latest obsession is.
m225 Printer
Dear m225 Printer, I'm not really sure how to say this... but I don't think things are working out between the two of us. I'm sorry -- I just can't do this anymore. When I first arrived in Arizona we initially hit it off. When I needed to print something, you were there for me, and I think we had something really special going on. But after the initial thrill of our relationship, things began to flounder.
To be frank, I think you are a bit dysfunctional. I'm not saying this to be mean, I'm saying it because it needs to be said. You *need* help, and I just can't be the one to give it to you. For countless days you just simply wouldn't print. Now, I can understand not printing when your toner is running low -- we all have those days -- but you were leagues beyond that in dereliction. And I think you took advantage of my forgiving nature, printing just often enough to make me think that maybe things will finally go back to the way they were when we first started printing. But they haven't, and I've had enough.
Ohh, and I've been seeing other printers. Just because you don't want to print doesn't mean I am just gonna sit around the house writing things with a pen. Call me selfish, but I need a printer that puts out. Sorry m225, maybe in another lifetime things would have worked.
Dan "Daft Punk" Champion
After finishing writing his dissertation in early October, Dan Champion embarked on an epic bender the end of which may never come. This bender began with Dan ceasing and desisting all work related to math and spending the remainder of October Bedazzling and tinkering in his workshop. The result of which was a perfect recreation of Thomas Bangalter's Daft Punk costume [see photo]. You might be thinking Dan was just super pumped about Halloween, but he didn't stop there! He wore his Bedazzled Daft Punk jacket everywhere in the subsequent months including donning the costume at the TRON premiere.
As of October 2010, Dan was quite possibly the sole remaining teetotaler on Earth, but this too came to an end. In true style, Dan's first drink was an impressively masculine "tangerine dream" at Plush. The list of rugged sugary mixed drinks consumed by Dan is filled with so many fluffy names that I wouldn't be able to list them without obscuring the remainder of this message with stray feathers. After Dan defended his dissertation he hauled an impressive list of beverages in a single night including: mojitos, whiskey, gin and tonic, tequila shots, beer, screwdrivers... Dan let us know what was on his mind that night, including the following quotes that were repeated at least 17 times each:
"whiskey is disgusting"
"screwdrivers are awesome"
"why doesn't everyone only drink gin and tonics"
"wow, my leg doesn't hurt at all!"
"there's no more liquid in this glass"
It's true that Dan earned his PhD and got a job, but seriously, he spent a month Bedazzling instead of doing math. That alone warrants DOTY 2011, and a computer named CHAMPION in his honor.
The 2011 DOTY Committee
I'd like to nominate the 2011 DOTY committee. They're taking dereliction to heart, by being derelict in their performance of their DOTY duties. (Seriously, I can't even remember May 2011, which is when the award is supposed to happen). This sort of commitment to the cause cannot go unheralded. As we all know, great leaders lead by example. Bravo!
The 2011 DOTY Committee (Again)
I hereby nominate this year's DOTY Committee for remaining true to the DOTY standard and delaying the 2011 DOTY awards for 5 months.
The 2011 DOTY Committee (And again)
Cuis Custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who watches the watchmen?)
In past years, we have had some crazy derelicts-each one unique and wonderful in its own right. But this year, the level of dereliction has surpassed new heights-dereliction has reached meta levels. That is right-I nominate the DOTY committee itself for its conspicuous absence from the arizona community, only to return months later to save a little face. Lets take a look at the timeline.
They began the DOTY invitations notoriously late-on April 15, tax day. That's right-they are so lazy that they were hoping that a bad economy could act as subterfuge from the real story-that we need to hand in DOTY nominations. Much to their chagrin, DOTY nominations poured in a thousand fold, and due to the committee's derelictness, the people have not seen many of them. I know this because I tried to send a nomination earlier, only to have the email returned because of a full mailbox.
The nominations they have recorded all seem to pertain to Erik Davis. Don't get me wrong-he has truly earned a derelict nomination-but it seems like the committee is pushing for him to win-perhaps they think it is easier to count the votes if everyone votes for the same person.
After months without even hearing any whispers of a derelict committee, they decide to resurface, if only out of shame over gross dereliction of duty. They announce a party on Halloween weekend, hoping that no one actually shows (or that they can hide in unrecognizable costumes).
Finally, if you invite us to a party like it is a brown bag, then I expect some freakin' bagels.
There dereliction can be summed up as so:
Once upon a time,
Dereliction on the line
A committee lost
As present as Tucson Frost