Don't Stand So Close to Me

I have this recurrent dream. A hot, female undergraduate is asking me what she has to do to boost her grade at the end of the semester. We're alone -- older male teacher and young female student. There's even background music to this scene and it's "Don't stand so close to me" by The Police. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let's start at the beginning of the semester.

The C++ course was not what I wanted to teach. But the assistant dean asked me just that, and it's best for an adjunct teacher to never say "no" to a course offering. So I find that there are 24 students enrolled including one female. This heavy imbalance is not unusual as the computer industry is male-dominated. Since it was the Spring semester I could count on most of the students being in their early twenties. For some reason the older, and frequently ex-military, students take my class in the Fall. I can't explain why the older students appear in the Fall, while the younger students come out in the Spring, but an attitude difference is readily apparent. The younger students just treat their college courses like high school courses as in "what is the least amount of work I can do to get a good grade?" The older students want to learn something in order to get a job.

This Spring my male dominated roster showed a wide range of programming skills. Some were decent programmers already, while others were unprepared having bluffed their way through the prerequisite courses. Most were in the middle.

In the decent programming skills group was Vince who proclaimed out loud the first class that he had eight years of programming experience. This programming veteran looked like a caricature right out of Mad Magazine having a pimple-laced face and wildly angle teeth. He talked boastfully about all of his experience setting up servers and compiling open source programs with his custom changes. The trouble was that Vince just did not want to listen to my lectures and do my assignments.

Also in this decent programmer group was Dan. Now Dan is my all-time favorite student. But it's not because he worked the hardest or got the best grades. It's because Dan always listened to my lectures and he always nodded in agreement to whatever I said. I would look around the classroom and see that students were either looking at me with no expression or staring at their computer screens. Dan was the one student I could count on to be paying attention and nodding affirmatively at all times. What a way to send positive energy back to the teacher.

Let me use Ross as an example of one of the bluffers in the class. Ross always came in about 15 minutes late to class. Since I make all of my announcements at the beginning of class this means that he never heard a single announcement. He would do the least amount of work possible, yet was always seeking extra credit for anything and everything. I had to continually extend the deadlines for quizzes and assignments for him because he never turned anything in on time.

The solo female, Amanda, was definitely in her early twenties. She kept to herself and browsed the internet while I was lecturing. I can always tell when a student is on Facebook or doing e-mail. The student's face is just locked on the screen with fingers tapping on the keyboard. They are definitely not paying attention to me. Why should they? My years of programming expertise just can't make up for my monotone voice. And if you’re not into programming, this stuff is boring.

I know I can do something about this. I can use the teacher control software to put my screen on all of the students' computers. I don't do this for a couple of reasons. It would piss them off so that they hate me more. Or, they would just switch to their smartphones and continue to ignore me.

Well the middle of the semester comes around and I give my open-book midterm exam. I think it's really easy, but then again I know this stuff inside-out. I'm amazed at how poorly some of my best students do on the midterm. Did they coast because it's an open-book exam? Did they just fail to study? I'll never know.

As the course drags on I notice that Amanda hasn't showed up for weeks. She hasn't dropped the course but she's behaving like she has. I send an e-mail to her as I would for any student who's acting like he/she is done with the course. No reply.

Well it's a week before finals and I finally scan the student's grades. I can see that Amanda is at the bottom having done about half of the assignments and half of the on-line quizzes. To my surprise she sends me an e-mail the same day and says she wants to meet me during my office hours. I agree and set a time for us to meet.

She shows up wearing exercise clothes: skin-tight nylon stuff that shows off every curve in her very curvy body. She sits opposite to me and says "Is there anything, I mean anything, I can do for extra credit?"

Now I'm getting nervous for a couple of reasons. One is that another adjunct might walk into the shared office where we are alone. The other is that I'm not exactly sure what she's willing to do for "extra credit."

So I say, "Amanda, did you ever hear of Riemann's zeta function? It's a pretty simple polynomial function but it's amazingly complex when its domain is the complex number system."

Amanda looks at me with utter non-comprehension as if I were speaking Greek to her. Greek, that's funny because the zeta function is stated with many symbols from the Greek alphabet.

"Well the zeta function expands to an infinite polynomial and like any polynomial we're interested in where there are zero values."

Now Amanda has started to lick her lips and blink her eyes to try to distract me, but I'm getting excited because I think I'm explaining the zeta function so well.

"Mathematicians have found many of the non-trivial zeros of the zeta function and since the domain is complex numbers the zeros have a real and an imaginary part. For all of the non-trivial zeros found thus far it's true that the real part is equal to 1/2. Isn't that amazing?"

Now Amanda is looking at me with serious confusion in her eyes like, "What the hell is this guy talking about? He must be hopeless."

"Okay, of all the non-trivial zeros found thus far the real part is equal to 1/2 -- but is this true for all possible non-trivial zeros? The assertion to the positive is called the Riemann Hypothesis and it hasn't been proven or disproven for over 150 years. What do you think?'

Amanda answers, "I think I don't understand. Besides what does this have to do with getting extra credit for the course?"

"I understand your confusion. I didn’t make clear the distinction between trivial and non-trivial zeros. The trivial zeros turn out to be all of the negative even integers like -2, -4, -6, etc. That's a consequence of the fact that zeta value of the quantity one minus s (e.g. z(1-s)) equals a value that has the sine function as a multiplicative factor and the value of that sine function is zero precisely at those negative even integers."

Amanda says, "I still don't understand. What can I do?"

"Well I was thinking that if you contributed to solving the Riemann Hypothesis, even a small contribution such as a tangential theorem, then I couldn't help but give you an A for the course."

Amanda left without a word.

I call out after her, "Did I say something wrong?" And she didn't ever stand close to me.