The Ace of Procrastination

A clever essay on procrastination by a Cornell blogger reminded me of my 4th year roommate at Cornell (mine was a 5-year undergraduate curriculum in Engineering Physics). My roommate John was a procrastinator extraordinaire. He was also the only personal acquaintance I have ever had with a math genius.

John's routine was to attend the first class of every lecture course, which for him was every course, since he had switched majors from physics to math to avoid having to register for lab courses. His sole purpose in attending the first class was to find a classmate who would inform him of an upcoming prelim (Cornell speak for "major exam"). I don't know if any money changed hands, but John's classmate also would agree to let John borrow his class notes when he had finished studying them. This usually happened past midnight the night before a prelim.

On one such occasion, the prelim was a midterm exam in one of John's math courses. He confidently returned home from his classmate's with the notebook he needed. As usual it was after midnight, but the prelim was scheduled for the morning. There simply wasn't enough time to wade through all the notes for half the semester.

Nevertheless, John aced the exam. In particular, he was the only one who managed a correct proof for one of the questions. The professor was impressed, but also somewhat perplexed. According to the professor's annotation in John's graded prelim booklet, John had used a proof the professor had never seen before. But the professor was confused why John avoided using the traditional proof they had covered in the course.

I am not sure if John ever revealed his reason for using his original proof, but he did assist the professor grading exams for the remainder of this course as well as for the other courses taught by this professor. John's monetary compensation was nominal. The real payoff for John was that his attendance in class was not required.