Boxes for Boxer

My brother texted me on Monday saying that there were seven (or so) boxes pilled up (outside!) in front of the mathematics department and all addressed to George Boxer. My first thought was that this was a transatlantic move gone horribly wrong, so I emailed the department looking for volunteer graduate students to haul the boxes inside. I managed to acquire the boxes the next day:

Now the boxes turned out not to contain the entire sum of George’s possessions (nor a large pile of cash, unfortunately), but somewhat more hilariously it consisted of reprints from our recently published paper (previously blogged about here). This was amazingly silly for a number of reasons. First, at 350 pages, the paper is kind of bulky, and certainly AFAIK nobody asked for reprints. Second, George Boxer hasn’t been at Chicago for a few years (though admittedly that is his listed address on the paper). Third, if IHES is going to send 17,500 pages of math to one of the four authors, perhaps it might have made more sense to send it to Vincent Pilloni who is five minutes away from IHES rather than to Chicago? Looking more closely at the boxes it seems as though the big boxes contain eight copies of the paper and the one small box contained two. But actually there were only 5 big boxes rather than six, so only 42 copies in total rather than 50. That makes me suspect that one of the boxes went missing. Possibly a porch pirate ran off with a box before they were carried inside (look for copies on the black market at 57th street books), or maybe there is a box floating in the Atlantic somewhere… Anyway, I now have a large collection of bulky (but still surprisingly light — perhaps recycled paper) reprints in my office. I think it should make good fort building material for LC.