I just found out that Lucien Szpiro recently passed away. I met him only once in late 2018 when I gave the joint NY number theory at CUNY. When I arrived at my hotel (the Gregory) around 10pm, I was somewhat shocked to find that nobody had made me a reservation, and the hotel was completely booked out. I was tempted to try the Langham on the opposite side of the street, but thought that might probably bankrupt the CUNY seminar budget for the next few years, so instead I started wandering the streets of NYC trying to find a more modest hotel with a vacancy (without any success — I’m not sure if there was something going on or whether it’s always hard to find a hotel room in NYC in mid-October). With a little help from JC back in Chicago with a reliable internet connection and access to hotels.com, I eventually found the one remaining room in a Best Western a few streets away for about $450 a night. When Lucien found out about what happened the next day, he vigorously tried to persuade me to accept a personal check from him to cover my costs before the reimbursement process could be sorted out. Though I insisted on declining his generous offer, a few days later I received a personal check from him in the mail, and this time I cashed it. And it was just as well, because CUNY did deny my reimbursement request for going over the daily limit for hotels, before finally [with a little more help from locals] “generously” agreeing to a “one time exception” to cover their own incompetence. I was then finally able to pay Szpiro back via Venmo (at least through the intermediary of Alex Gamburd, friend of the blog). Although this was our only ever interaction, it certainly left a very positive impression on me.
Tim Brooke-Taylor also recently died. If you grew up in Australia in the 1980s then there’s a good chance you have a deep place in your heart for the Goodies. (Further evidence: see this week’s Australian letter in the New York Times.) In addition to the absurdist humor, there were also plenty of 70s British cultural and political references which were somewhat lost on a 10 year old kid in 80s Melbourne; I wonder what a 10 year old kid in 2020s Chicago would think?