Derelict of the Year 2015
2015 Winner:
Jerry Luo: Four more years ... Six more years!Party Info
TIME AND DATE: May 8th(...), 2015LOCATION: 408 Joesler Ct. (Please park on 8th Ave.)
Feel free to bring food, drinks, or donations.
Nominations
- Cody Gunton
- Jerry Luo
- Austin Nickel
- Ethan "The Cookie Monster" Lockhart
- Department of Mathematics
- Department of Mathematics \setminus DOTY Committee
- Austin Nickel
- Jerry Luo
- Jerry Luo
- Victoria
- The Developers of Microsoft Windows
- The Waters Brothers
- Jerry Luo
- Jerry Luo
- Andrew "Scrumptious!" Leach
Cody Gunton
I would like to nominate Cody Gunton for suggesting to the entire department that people meet for Happy Hour during the first colloquium of the year, which was a combined event that included both math & applied math. Cheers to Cody for promoting an early start of yearly dereliction for us all!Jerry Luo
"Swipe right for Jerry"Many years ago, in a far away land, a child was born. In that moment, the essence of the DOTY materialized into human form. A lifetime crafted for the sole purpose of embodying dereliction. From a young age, Jerry Luo honed his skills with the high school debate team and then later as a not-so-fresh-faced college student at UCLA. After arriving at the University of Arizona Math Department, his fate was realized. Jerry's antics could be enumerated (with a long list), however putting them into words would serve as an injustice. We cannot simply describe the actions that Jerry has taken which exemplify this award. They are beyond words.
Austin Nickel
I nominate Austin Nickel for making this post in a Facebook event.:The final "puzzle" activity, whatever it is, should be something that forces [...] (us) [...] to work together to complete some nontrivial cognitive task. Out of the ideas I've heard so far, I think the original jigsaw puzzle idea fits this description the best. Some people have voiced complaints to the effect of "but having to sit down and spend a long time on a jigsaw puzzle will be a total buzzkill". While I agree that spending several hours on some complicated 500-1000 piece puzzle is not a good friday night activity, something around 200 pieces [...].
Reasons the citizenship test might be questionable:
1) If it's anything like this:, it's way too easy.
2) It's not clear what the best way to decide who wins is. If one team barely passes the test but finishes a few minutes earlier than a team that gets a perfect score, who wins?
3) It's hard to discuss answers without other teams overhearing. This means we all have to go into separate rooms (lame), or all have different tests with disjoint question sets (difficult to organize). [...].
4) It's not a very good teamwork activity. Either someone on your team definitively knows the answer, or everyone bickers a bit about what their best guess is, and then someone bubbles in an answer on which the previous discussion may or may not have had an influence. I guess it's more efficient to just split the test up four ways, but then it's just a bunch of people taking a multiple choice test individually, which sounds (to me at least) much less enjoyable than the jigsaw puzzle.
Anyways, I probably did my cause a disservice by writing such an obnoxiously long post, but I think the jigsaw puzzle will be a lot of fun [...] . I like the dart idea too, but there's no way I'm going to make a bullseye [...].
Ethan "The Cookie Monster" Lockhart
Conjecture: A graduate student is capable of living on nothing more than free departmental cookiesSince the very first time that those chocolate laden morsels made their appearance, progress had eluded even the most nimble of minds. Who would have guessed that in the end, it would be proven in a single line.
Ethan Lockhart Q.E.D.
Sometimes the answer is so close, that you can't see it even when it is staring you in the face while chewing on the very last oreo. Perhaps it is because you are too busy wondering how he gets there every time before you. From living deep in the pits of dereliction, he has evolved a nearly supernatural ability to predict the arrival of his sustainance. That or he regularly checks his inbox for tea time emails.
The real feast comes before the Applied Colloquium, with all of the raspberry crumbles and gooey caramel bars. Ethan's hands deftly operate the cookie tongs and clear out the tray in the blink of an eye. I've witnessed him stack mountains of cookies so high, that you could not see the man himself behind it. Not to remain obscured by his cookie fortress, his ambitions drove him to eat his way to the surface. For he was to become a legend, immortalized through his name in a proof, and as 2015's Derelict of the Year.
Department of Mathematics
I'd like to nominate the department as a whole for not getting off our collective asses to nominate DOTY candidates.Department of Mathematics \setminus DOTY Committee
I nominate the department, minus the DOTY committee, for failing to recognize the importance of DOTY. ;)Clearly the Committee did their job in reminding everyone of this important duty. The remainder of the Department failed to recognize their DOTY duty, and is thus eligible for receipt of the DOTY.
Austin Nickel
For this:Jerry Luo, for attmpting to "disarm" Luke
I hereby nominate Jerry Luo for attempting to "disarm" Luke Edwards (who was only "armed" with the arms attached to his body) and in so doing breaking the handle to Victoria's car door. Jerry went on to solve the problem of the broken car door handle by the time-honored DOTY method of ignoring problems until they go away. To his dismay, the same method did not work in the analysis core class.Jerry Luo, for his work in "compressed sensing"
I nominate Jerry Luo for his interdisciplinary efforts at a certain evening engagement with graduate students in the Department in Physics. Upon arriving at said engagement, Jerry, being eager to find collaborators, immediately disappeared into a crowd of non-mathematicians and struck up a (loud) conversation. The topic was, QUITE APPROPRIATELY, "compressed sensing". While everything he said made a great deal of sense to him, I fear that the sparsity was too great for the physicists, who seemed somewhat put off and stooped to mockery in the form of babbling nonsense at him--how rude! Jerry continue deeper into the party, making his way to the pool, where people were swimming on a January evening. He decided to test the temperature of the water with his hand and, somehow, ended up fully submerged wearing all of his clothes. Do I expect there was foul play in the form of push? No. I believe it was something internal, that impulse that moves him to continually explore the frontiers, particularly those in one of his favorite subjects.Victoria, for her carelessness around fires
Some say the world will end in fire,Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
-Robert Frost
The Developers of Microsoft Windows
I would like to recognize the developers of Windows for their foresight in including a feature which installs critical OS updates with no need for action on the user's part. We all know that end users are too lazy to do this themselves, and really, what are the odds that it will interrupt anything important--like, say, a dissertation defense?The Waters Brothers
We all know Patrick Waters is a departmental star in both mathematics and dereliction (cf. DOTY 2010), but this year his brothers stole the show on the day of his defense. To begin, Patrick went home late in the morning to practice his slides before the talk and found each of his brothers six beers in. This being a mere warm-up, the brothers behaved with perfect civility during Patrick's defense; however, after several pitchers at Gentle Ben's, their true colors began to show in a quite literal fashion, as they tested the boundaries of decency in clothing--or lack of clothing--on the way to Sky Bar.An hour or so later, after more beers and shots, the story appeared to be over. The Waters brothers wisely decided that they were too intoxicated to stay out, and that they should walk home so that they might catch their taxi to the airport in the morning. Unfortunately they were too intoxicated to distinguish between "8th Street" and "8th Avenue," which is why the remaining celebrators chanced upon them wandering aimlessly around the streets of West University an hour after they had left the bar.
The Waters brothers have reminded us all of the importance of family, and for that I nominate them for the DOTY.
...Jerry Luo
Jerry has three nominations already, so I'm just going to send in the attached photo (if the DOTY committee should decide to redact this from online publication, I will make sure it is displayed at the party). [Click to see]Jerry "King DOTY" Luo
An honest man, Jerry more or less nominated himself for this years DOTY by posting the following on social media:"The hard part about getting yourself to start studying is first admitting that you haven't learned anything all semester."
At least the King DOTY knows how to wear his crown.
Andrew "Scrumptious!" Leach
Despite this being his fourth year in the program and his second year hosting the DOTY party (bless his soul), it would seem from the following party-planning text message that Andrew still doesn't quite understand the nature of the beast:"...I'm thinking about doing watermelon palomas. Deciding on bites still. Could do nachos again. Or I could use the massive amounts of red pepper jam I still have. Maybe toasts with jam and a bit of herb whipped goat cheese?"