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Comment by tt | Hacker News Reader

I was fortunate to be a student of Dr. Bose many years ago. No other professor gave unlimited time on exams, plus free Toscanini's ice cream to boot!

Beyond those small perks, his stories working with Norbert Wiener and his inspirations have completely transformed and shaped my personality and how I solve problems. Above all, the highest integrity one would have with his/her work, has been my #1 beacon thanks to Dr. Bose. I will always cherish that end-of-term field trip at his corporate headquarters where I witnessed amazing demos (including the active automobile suspensions), and heard even more stories that made me believe that anything is possible when you put your mind and heart into it.

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> I was fortunate to be a student of Dr. Bose many years ago. No other professor gave unlimited time on exams, plus free Toscanini's ice cream to boot!

Unlimited time and free food is a good thing? I went to Harvey Mudd and the only thing more terrifying than an unlimited time exam was an unlimited time exam with free food. It was a surefire indicator that you were about to lose a significant chunk of your time working on a nigh-impossible exam. I guess it's just weird to find out that this isn't universal.

Those were great perks since no other classes I knew had them. Bose didn't offer these things so he could have impossible exams. He offered them because he was cool like that. :)

If you knew your materials, it would have taken about 1 to 1.5 hrs to finish the exam. The vast majority finished within 2 hrs (typical duration of MIT night exams). But indeed there were a few who stuck around for 4-5 hrs. At least one TA had to stick around too.

Ah, that's a much different case. There's a (true) horror story about an upper division physics course at Harvey Mudd. It was an unlimited time proctored exam. The prof apparently expected the students to spend 4-5 hours, but when nobody had left by then he had to order some pizzas to feed them. If I remember the story correctly, most of the students exceeded 20 hours and, I might be making this up, but I believe a couple got into the 40-some range.

This isn't really the usual case (most of the unlimited time exams are take home exams rather than proctored), but it's still terrifying.

>But indeed there were a few who stuck around for 4-5 hrs. At least one TA had to stick around too.

In one of our exams, there was supposedly a student who remained in the hall until 3 or 4am. It was unlimited time and s/he decided to take advantage of it. I took the class pass/fail (I was an Mech E so I didn't have a great background in the advanced EE stuff underpinning some of the concepts) so I always left sooner than I really should have since I didn't sweat the small stuff.

I am interested. What did him and Wiener work on?

Bose spent over a decade working with Wiener. It started when Lee recruited Bose (as a grad student) to work under Wiener.

Bose often told the story of the initial encounter, in which he spent 6 months fearing for his life because his level of math versus that of Wiener was equivalent to a child who knows basic arithmetic versus someone well versed with Calculus.

They worked together on a wide variety of projects, including bio-engineering projects where they measured brain signals of hospital patients who lost, say, their arms but was asked to pretend to move their fingers as if their arms were still attached.

According to Bose, Wiener was a total genius who had an amazing memory. He fully memorized AND understood the human anatomy down to every detail, and often corrected experienced Harvard doctors from mistakes, large or small.

Wiener told Bose that he resented his upbringing because his parents wanted to see if they could raise a genius. By age 7, Wiener's eyesight was nearly shot from so much reading, but his parents pushed on and made Wiener do everything in his head instead.

Fascinating.

I have Weiners book "Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine" (unfortunately not in the hardback version) and although I don't understand the math in the book I still read it to the best of my ability.

Another book that I did understand and which made me understand Weiners book a little better conceptually was Valentino Braitenbergs "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" a fantastick book for math morons like myself.

Thank you so much for your little story.

> Wiener told Bose that he resented his upbringing because his parents wanted to see if they could raise a genius.

Looks like they were pretty successful.

sorry I have only a little value to add... but Toscanini's is some of the best ice cream you can get in Boston.

3 words for you: Ginger Snap Molasses.

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