Host: What if I challenged you to start a software company and keep it cash flow positive 40 years later? There’s a catch though. You are the only full-time employee and you can only hire summer interns, teenagers to be exact. Sounds impossible, right? Today, you’re going to meet an MIT alumnus who accomplished this feat. I know because I was one of those teenage summer interns.

Curtis: After graduating from MIT and having a few years the workplace, that’s when I began my own business and simultaneously being an Educational Counselor. And I found that it was incredibly energizing to meet MIT undergraduate applicants like yourself.

Host: That’s Curtis Blaine, MIT Class of ’67, Courses 15 and 21B, Baker House. He’s the founder and CEO of Math Tutor, a company that has surprisingly weathered the storm of technology shifts over the past few decades.

[music in]

Like me, he’s also an Educational Counselor, an MIT alum who interviews prospective MIT undergraduate applicants as part of the admissions process.

This episode intertwines Curtis’s journey with mine. I caught up with him 33 years after he interviewed me for my undergrad application, setting in motion an academic journey that changed my life. This time, the tables were turned and I got to ask the questions. I had no idea how many surprises were in store for me.

I’m Ravi Patil. And this is Institrve, true stories about MIT, a trove of wonder discovery and madness. This podcast explores the diversity of the human experience. The question of what it means to be human is a timeless one. By hearing the stories of others, we just may find a piece of ourselves and be inspired to transcend our own limitations.

[music out]

Host: What attracted you to MIT?

Curtis: Going to MIT, wasn’t my first choice, believe it or not, but Caltech was. The allure was California. I was living in New York when I was in high school.

Host: I applied to MIT and Caltech. Somehow I got into both but MIT was always first on my list, so I didn’t even bother giving Caltech a thought.  

Curtis: I think MIT offers so many things, not just the being in Boston angle, but the richness of all the other experiences outside of the classroom. I’m really grateful. I have the fondest memories.

Host: Curtis spent an extra year at MIT and earned bachelor’s degrees in management and humanities.

Curtis:  I had been interested in athletics in high school and in particular, weightlifting and things like taking protein supplements to build your muscles. When I got to MIT, I was actually thinking of majoring in nutrition and food science.

But, that didn’t last very long. I certainly saw huge opportunities elsewhere. To make a long story short, I needed a fifth year because I hadn’t quite enough credits in any particular major by the end of my fourth year. So I needed a fifth year and I got a second bachelor’s degree.

Host:  We’ll revisit his comical foray into nutrition a bit later.

Did you live on campus during your time at the Tute?

Curtis: I was in Baker House. I really enjoyed it. There is one funny hack.

Some students went to one of the bathrooms in the winter. They opened the window. They turned on the showers hot. [sfx: shower turning on] And they created just the right conditions to generate snow and the whole bathroom was filled with snow. And somebody took a picture of it and they sent it to The Boston Globe and The Globe ran this story. MIT students, single-handedly make snow or something like that. The funny thing about it is that it wasn’t true at all. They just got a bunch of snow from outside and carried it up into the bathroom. And so the hack was on The Boston Globe for running the story and portraying these MIT geniuses. So to me, that’s a pretty funny story.

Host: Check out the show notes for a link to The Tech article.

After you graduated, did you head right into your startup?  

Curtis: I did not come right into the business. I decided to get an MBA. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. And I thought by getting an MBA, I’d position myself to go in different directions, not necessarily business. I was more of a creative person. So I ended up coming to the University of Chicago Business School. And eventually I met my future wife and we married and then we moved to Munster. Before the company started, I was a self-employed contract programmer for IBM. And so I had a client base and income from that.

Host: So, let’s start with your software business.

Curtis:  The name of the company is Math Tutor Educational Software. And the website is called mathtutor.com. The company markets software that teaches pretty much grades 6 through 12 of math: pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, and on up. There’s an SAT math, a business math course, and the newest entry is called “Advanced Business Math,” which gets into installment loans and things like that. Products have been developed for Windows PCs and were distributed either by download or by sending the customer CD. We’ve been around since 1983.

I started out with a partner, a math instructor at Purdue University’s extension campus in Hammond. But because finances were tight at the beginning, after six months of working very hard on our first program, he had to go find a job. We just, at that point, had the SAT program to sell and did not yet even have Algebra I.

Host: So the idea of learning math on the computer will sound commonplace to today’s audience. However, when you dreamed up this idea in 1983, it was quite revolutionary.  At the time when computers were finding their way into people’s homes for the very first time, they could now learn math. You had perfect timing!

Curtis: It was perfectly timed because personal computers were the brand new hot thing and parents were buying them for their kids for entertainment, but also for educational purposes.

So with a very small revenues we had, my partner could not continue on. This all led to our realization that we’ve just got to find talented programmers.

Host: You only had developers working during the summers. So you had three months to get your product development done. How did you go about planning your roadmap based on that kind of seasonality?

Curtis: Excellent question. I think that it was never the expectation that this would persist forever. And so in the summer of ’84, I borrowed some computers from a local church.

Munster High School had some excellent math students. They were always in the newspaper having won some state competition. And, we spoke to the math department. About 4 or 5 students worked for me. We got a lot done. It was very productive.

After the summer ended, I would often just work intensely hard trying to finish what the students hadn’t quite finished. And if I didn’t have the time to do that, it really didn’t get done. It just waited until the next summer came around. This is not a good way to introduce new products. We did the best we could, but did not get products to market quite as quickly as we had hoped to.  

Host: And this is how I crossed paths with Curtis. I showed up at his home in October 1988 for my MIT interview.  

I remember just being so nervous of not knowing what to expect because this is it. This is MIT.

Curtis: Your one chance.

Host: I still remember what I wore when I came to see you in your living room, sitting on the couch and having that interview and just being utterly excited and terrified at the same time.

Curtis: Yes.

Host: It was a very enjoyable experience because you had all kinds of stuff with you.  I had the regular brochures but you had some extra stuff that I hadn’t seen before and I was hungry for anything MIT related.

Curtis: I’m always working as hard as possible to help students who who are applying. To do a good job of interviewing the applicant and writing the report. I always feel this desire to tell them about the really unique things that MIT offers.

Host:  For many folks, as was the case with me, when I met you the first time, I had never met an MIT alum before and my only knowledge of MIT was the admissions brochure I had, and this is in the ’80s, or seeing the PBS show about the 2.70 contest. That’s all I had.

For the person being interviewed, that interaction allows them to fill that space in their mind. Of course, these days you have the blogs on the admissions site and countless YouTube videos to get a sense for the place. But the role of that interviewer in demystifying MIT is a very important one.

Curtis: I totally agree. Before the interview that I had, MIT didn’t really have the face of a human.  

Host: My main worry about MIT was that it was going to be cutthroat competition, cold, the dark gray skies of Cambridge, and am I going to be just surrounded by robots?

And I found the experience to be exactly the opposite. The friendships that were developed there, the camaraderie among all the students. I never felt in competition with other students which is so counterintuitive. I felt the main competition was with myself. Could I keep up? Could I do everything I wanted to do?

Curtis: Yeah, I I totally agree with what you’re saying. I did not feel that competition. I think most of the friends I had at MIT did not either. I enjoyed just being there and being a part of this enterprise that is so special in terms of advancing knowledge and preparing students for the future.

Host: So I have a confession to make. In preparing for the interview, I had no idea what to expect and so I did spend a part of my time reviewing trigonometric identities and looking at my chemistry book, just in case.

Curtis: I should have asked you a question just to, justify that preparation.

Host: Oh, I’m glad you didn’t!

Curtis: Yeah, I could have added some entertainment by having a periodic table on the wall and, just maybe, singing out the elements,

Host: At the end of the Interview, Curtis stunned me with a summer job offer. I immediately said “Yes!” and concluded the interview went well.  

[music in]

And so I snail mailed my early action application and began the endless wait, hoping for the best but expecting the worst.

I was waiting to get notification and the urban legend was, of course, that if you receive a thin envelope, that means you had gotten rejected and if it was a thick packet, you had gotten in.  I guided my whole psyche around that belief.

And so what happened was on that Saturday morning, it was December 17th actually, that I was sleeping in and the phone rang. My mom picked up the phone and then I heard her screaming from downstairs for me to pick up the phone. I was like, what? At 8 in the morning on Saturday? So I was still in bed when I picked up the phone. And then you were on the other end of the line

Curtis: Oh.

Host: congratulating me on my acceptance.

 Curtis: I guess you found out it was just about as soon as I did.

Host: Yes, and I just jumped out of bed. I couldn’t believe what I had just heard and I was in disbelief. I was elated but in disbelief for a few hours. And then the mailman came later on in the day, and low and behold, it was a thin envelope, one sheet of paper.

Curtis: Oh my God.

Host: So I’m very grateful that you called me. Otherwise, I would’ve been crushed.

[music out]

During the summer before college, I worked at Math Tutor programming educational lessons for differential and integral calculus.  

It was the perfect job for me because the class that really opened up my mind was calculus. I was so enthralled by that subject. It was the first class I had in the morning, senior year of high school. And I literally could not wait to go to school for this class.

And then, after the year was done, I started a summer job doing the same stuff.

Curtis: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s a challenge because you’re being asked to take what you know, and represent it. You had to come up with problems. You had to come up with ways to generate the wrong answers. Things like that were really challenging. In a way it could really reinforce your understanding.

Host: It made me think more abstractly. There wasn’t a fixed set of problems in the bank. We had problem generators. So there’ll be a lot of random number statements in the problems. And then in order to get the animation to work, you have to know how many characters were in the string, because the way the parentheses were moving around and the multiplication symbols and stuff, at any given moment, you needed to know precisely how many characters were being printed on screen.

So it was a very interesting meta math problem, so to speak. You are solving a calculus problem but behind the scenes, the developer, in which case it was me, had to keep track of all these other things to do the animation correctly. So I thought that was very fascinating.

Curtis: Yeah. Yeah. That’s something that has to be thought through carefully as you’re designing the layout of this screen.

Nowadays with animation everywhere in software, it’s not really talked about so much, but at the time, it was one of the very few educational software programs that did that. And we would get testimonials from schools saying the students are enamored of the animation effects.

And I think it wasn’t just teaching things, but it was getting the student enjoying the experience of learning and that was part of what you did, definitely. You did great work. A lot of the code you wrote is definitely still out there being used productively.

Host: I am blown away that my code from decades ago is still in use today.

Curtis: If anybody went under the hood and looked at the uncompiled code, they would see all the remarks and Ravi Patil would be one of the authors

Host: Oh, you know what? Next time I come to Munster I would love to see that.

Curtis: We had to sanitize it and take all the bugs out later, but no, I’m kidding. But, no, you did great work and I have fond memories.

Host: The summer job paid well and funded many pistachio ice cream cones at the Student Center Tosci’s. Rest in peace.

How do you compete with Khan Academy, which is free?

Curtis: Maybe I should stop right now and retire. No, that’s a good question. I think the answer is that in some ways, I believe it really is better. I like Khan Academy in many ways but they don’t have the animation. They don’t have the randomized problems. You can do problems, but they’re a fixed library of problems. And I just think the interactivity will give you a learning opportunity that’s more dynamic and interactive. Again, I really like Khan Academy, so I’m not criticizing it in any way.

Host: Khan Academy was founded by MIT alumnus Sal Khan and is an amazing education platform. Sal, if you’re listening, would love to have you on the show.

Curtis: Let me ask you one question. During the years that I had the students down here in the basement. That’s where I am right now. As a matter of fact, my home office. I was smoking a pipe a lot. I had to stop eventually because my dentist warned me about what might be coming. But I hope I didn’t subject these students I had to any unpleasant smoke. Now that we know more about secondhand smoke, I truly regret it. I hope it wasn’t something that you had to really suffer through.

Host:  That’s very kind of you to ask. I have no recollection of even smelling pipe smoke.

Curtis: Okay. It could be that I stopped that before you started but anyway, I’m glad you didn’t.

Host: Math Tutor caught a lucky break in the early ’90s.  

Curtis: In 1992, we were contacted by Houghton Mifflin publishing company in Boston. And they had seen our products and liked them. They wanted to have supplemental software to give to people who purchased the textbooks but our products didn’t quite exactly line up with the topics that were covered in the textbooks. I went to Boston and we worked out a deal. I did part of the work. Mike did part of the work to deliver to Houghton Mifflin the software that they wanted.

Host: Mike was a former summer intern.

Curtis: The revenue from that was quite good.

Host: The high from this deal was short-lived.

Curtis: Mike continued on for a while after the Houghton Mifflin project was completed. One day, he simply said he wanted to leave. I was really shocked and disappointed because we had just worked out a full time deal where he would be well paid.

And since I’m not telling you his last name, I’m not divulging too much but it turned out Mike discovered, maybe 15 years later, that he had bipolar disease. And he ended up writing a book talking about illness and his discovery of that, which had not been made until he was practically 40 years old. And it explained to him all the episodes his life, where he’d been either extremely energized and super productive or really down in the dumps.

Every person is different and you can’t just treat them as programmers. You have to recognize your individuality and try to accommodate that or help them or just live within that reality.

Host: A nice takeaway, reflecting mind, hand, and heart.  

Curtis: I haven’t talked to Mike too much since he wrote the book and but I think he’s doing quite well.

Host: Let’s switch gears and go back to educational counseling. What prompted you to become an EC?

Curtis:  That’s a funny story. [sfx: busy restaurant] The person who was previously the EC for the northwest Indiana region invited me to a nice lunch. A little bit more pricey than I would normally go to. And, they don’t exist anymore, but it was Phil Schmidt’s, a legendary fish place but they also specialize in gooseberry pie. And, that was delicious. We were talking and just having a grand all the time. As we’re wrapping up, he lays on me the fact that he’s moving to Florida and desperately needed someone to step in for him. I was roped into it without realizing what happened. I’m very grateful for having had the opportunity.

Host: What impact did interviewing these applicants have on you?

Curtis: The students that I interviewed were inspiring. They showed me how good the local school system was here in Munster, Indiana.

It inspired me to think about how the world is going to be changed by these young men and women full of ideas and enthusiasm and idealism ready to take their place in society. So seeing that firsthand gave me a chance to really get a very good feeling about the future of the country and society in general.

Even though I’m interviewing them, they benefited me a great deal. It gave me a chance to ask for some ideas on how educational software can be employed to help students learn math and helped me to improve the products that I had.

Host: I have the same experience. It’s the feeling of “We’re in good hands.” When we think about all of these daunting challenges in front of us with climate change, artificial intelligence, biological engineering, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and become pessimistic.  

Curtis: That’s right. I can see so many benefits to being an educational counselor. Eventually, I did retire from that position, but I really value that experience and I encourage alumni to consider it because it’s a way to serve, to give back to MIT but also it’s a way of receiving from the students the kind of the vibes, the energy that they feel, and most importantly, I think it’s the idealism. And so it’s a way to recharge ourselves.

Host: I found it also had another inadvertent benefit for me. Seeing the wide variety of extracurricular activities they were doing inspired me and I seriously got into woodworking. I challenged myself to follow my curiosity and see where it led.

Curtis: Yes, that is something I did hear about. A great number of extracurricular activities.

Host: I had one heartbreaking experience as an EC.  I was interviewing this bright young man. During the interview I come to find out that he spent a chunk of his childhood homeless with his family. And despite those challenges, this fellow had a sparkle in his eye and he was so eager to learn and he would work after school at a small manufacturing warehousing company to help his family make ends meet. And just his assessment of life, of human dynamics. It was mind blowing. And I poured my heart out in writing the assessment. And I was really cheering him on, just absolutely eager to find out what happened. But it turns out he didn’t complete the application process.

Curtis: Oh, darn.

Host: Yeah, he would’ve made for a fantastic student at MIT. It would have transformed his life but he didn’t complete the application.

During podcast interviews, it’s common to find hidden gems in off topic discussion. I just couldn’t resist including the anecdotes about Curtis chasing a few dollars on campus.  The following took place during the summer of ’65. Enjoy.

Curtis: The Aero-Astro department had posted a notice for someone who was willing to be a guinea pig, and sit in a cockpit but the rest of the plane wasn’t there. [sfx: machinery shaking] And the idea was that while you were sitting in this cockpit, they would be jostling you around trying to see if you’d survive. Just to see your responses to the various physical stresses that you were undergoing. So I applied and I sat in the cockpit and I thought this would be great. I do hope they’ll pick me. They didn’t though and I never understood why.

Host:  Not to be deterred, Curtis donated his body to science once more. But this time he took it to the next level.  

Curtis: This was in the nutrition area. This researcher wanted to study digestion in the small intestine. So I’m laughing because, how do I fit into that? They told me the idea is I would swallow this tube. I would have down my throat for about 24 hours, but they told me, “Oh, it’s not so bad once you swallow it. It’s not gonna hurt you and it’s gonna help us a great deal.” Primarily, I was looking to make 20 bucks. I was less thinking about the future of science and had to pay some bills.

I swallowed this plastic tube. This is a hard, horrible experience. This thing going down your throat into your stomach. And what’s supposed to happen is that your digestive process, the persistalsis motion of your stomach, would move that tube along into your intestine just like it moves food along. The next day they would send some food or protein or something down through the tube and observe the digestive process taking place in the small intestine.

I had to go that whole day with this rubber tube coming out of my mouth. [sfx: tennis shots] I remember playing tennis. Literally, I had the end of the tube tucked away in my pocket of my shirt and here I was playing tennis, just doing normal stuff.

The next day, to finish the experiment, unfortunately, the tube had not worked its way down into my intestine. It has to do with the particulars of my stomach. There’s a little bit of a jiggle right there where the duodenum is. It just did not pass through as it usually would. Of course, food passes through but this tube did not.

They pulled it out, which is just equally unpleasant experience. And they said, “Okay, here’s 10 bucks instead of the 20 you would’ve gotten if you could’ve actually helped us. Get outta here!” So I disappointed them, myself as well, just getting 10 bucks as opposed to 20.

Host: Oh my goodness. So let me ask you this. MIT is such a weird and quirky place. I bet no one even questioned you as you walk down the Infinite why you have a rubber tube hanging outta your mouth?

Curtis: I fit in just like it in Star Wars. They have that crazy cafe where I guess all the creatures of the universe get together for a drink or two, and they all have their own particular weirdness about them. So, yep, I just fit in. And nobody said anything about it. Not that anyone else had a tube like I did.

In some way, yeah, that’s just another person at MIT doing his thing. In fact, on the tennis court, nobody even seemed to care about that. Although it was pretty obvious I had something going on there. I was not very good chasing down those drop shots. I slept with it okay. I played tennis with it okay. And I even ate, but, unfortunately, I never got that extra 10 bucks.

Host: I think you deserve that extra 10 bucks plus interest from the Institute.

Curtis: I second that and, hopefully the check will be in the mail very soon.

Host: Yes. I’ll see what I can do.

Do you think the crushing force of your forehand caused the tube to wriggle out?

Curtis: That would be nice to think. No, I don’t think so. When I was a boy, I used to have some pain in my stomach, just a stabbing pain and, it would just last a second or two and I never knew what that was.

When I was an adult, the gastroenterologist said, “You have a spastic duodenum.” He thought it was related to an ulcer that I might have had as a child. My childhood was a little bit stressed. My parents were getting divorced and that most likely explains the pains I would occasionally feel.

And my Mom had them too when she was a child. I believe in my Mom’s case, it was also a case of family stress. Her father had died when she was only about 12 or so. They were also going through The Depression. So my grandmother was a single parent supporting two children. And my Mom perhaps internalized all those stresses and it led, I’m just speculating here, that it led to ulcers for her as well.

Host: Ah, okay. Sorry to hear that but I’m glad you’re doing well.

 All right, back to the show.

Host: What’s your vision for the future of math tutor?

Curtis: What I envision is a very ambitious math portal which would provide opportunities to not just students in school but to the whole world, really, people from every walk of life. It would give everyone an opportunity to improve their math skills and to excite them about math. So that’s my vision. I do have prototype of it.

But my problem is even though I’m doing well financially, I’m pretty much working by myself and I’m looking for help. Either someone who can contribute directly to some of the design decisions about how this is gonna look and work or even software development help.

I’m also looking to talk to anybody who wants a part of the ownership of this product, which I probably would spin off into a separate company. I couldn’t promise specific financial rewards to anyone but I could say, “Why don’t we talk if this sounds of interest to you?” because I would like to explain more and the potential that I see.”

Host: Despite all of the innovation in education, it seems like we have a long way to go as a nation in terms of stem literacy.

Curtis: Isn’t it tragic how once a year, when we hear about the performance of American students, the performance drops. And it’s not always obvious what that means. It certainly doesn’t look good but is it a consequence of measuring their progress in a certain standardized way that doesn’t really reflect the educations that they’re getting? Or is it truly a fact that most students are leaving school even less prepared in math than they were in the past?

So I think math education’s at a crossword roads and so much of today’s technology and the future of innovation depends on basic math skills and STEM, which is a great initiative helping students to see math in context of engineering and real life applications.

Host: I’m curious about your prototype. How should folks get in touch with you to learn more?

Curtis: They could do that by finding the phone number on my website, which is mathtutor.com.

Host: How about email?

Curtis: Curtis [at] mathtutor.com.

Host: Let’s conclude this episode with a tough question. A matter of great personal interest. Do you at all recall what you wrote about me after the interview that you sent back to MIT? That was forever ago, I know.

Curtis: I really don’t. Actually it’s three feet away from my arm here. I have this file cabinet and every write-up is in there. I know it would have been glowing.

Host: Okay. So you might actually have it then?

Curtis: Oh, no, I do. I do for sure.

Host: Oh, okay!!

Curtis: I can get you a copy. I’ll make a PDF and email it to you.

Host: That would be wonderful! I can’t believe it. Thank you.

[music in]

Math Tutor, the software company Curtis founded almost 40 years ago, is still going strong today. After serving as an educational counselor for 34 years, Curtis passed the Baton to the next generation.

MIT alumni, this is where you come in. I have two requests:

[music out]

First, sign up to become an educational counselor. MIT received almost 34,000 applications for roughly 1,300 slots for the class of 2026. The Admissions Office would like to offer every applicant the opportunity to interview but was not able to accommodate every request. I’m told there was a statistically significant bump in applications due to that scene involving MIT in the movie Spiderman: No Way Home.

If you serve as an EC, you’ll make a difference in the journey of promising young adults, whether they are admitted or not. You’ll give back to MIT in a meaningful way. And you’ll certainly benefit personally.

Search on MIT Educational Counselor and you’ll find a link to learn more. I’ve also provided the link in the show notes. It’s easy to get started.

And second, Undergrad Alumni, contact your EC from years ago and say, “Hello!”
I can guarantee that your EC will be thrilled to hear from you.

[music in]

You may not realize this but your EC was heavily invested in your hopes and dreams and felt immense pride being a part of your MIT journey.

You never know what you’ll discover.

Choose happiness. See you next time.

[music out]

Host: While at MIT, a good friend of mine insisted that I attend 18.313, an undergraduate math course on probability. This course was taught by a beloved professor named Gian Carlo Rota. Rota was legendary for his enthusiasm, charisma, and clarity.

18.313 was probability for hard core mathematicians and physicists. As a mechanical engineering student, I had no business being there. But I went anyway to see what all the fuss was about. 

Rota loved Coca Cola and students had a can ready and waiting every time he entered the room.

[music in]

While sipping a can at the end of class one day, Rota made a casual remark about an unsolved problem. To his utter surprise, a sophomore with just the right combination of courage and genius solved the problem.

I’m not talking about the fictional janitor in Good Will Hunting. I am talking about my real classmate, Ross Lippert, MIT Class of 93, PhD 98, Course 6, 8, and 18, Senior House.

Today, for the first time, we will hear the story directly from Ross.

I’m Ravi Patil. And this is Institrve, true stories about MIT, a trove of wonder discovery and madness. This podcast explores the diversity of the human experience. The question of what it means to be human is a timeless one. By hearing the stories of others, we just may find a piece of ourselves and be inspired to transcend our own limitations.

[music out]

What attracted you to math and science?

Ross: My physics class. I just like then already fast-tracked in math, but I didn’t think anything of it. I was taking algebra in seventh grade, calculus in 11th, but then, when I took my physics class and I realized that the calculus could do something then that opened up the possibility of, wow, I can understand the world what else can I do?

Host: Hmmm, Ross’s mother must have subconsciously wondered the same thing as she unwittingly pushed him into the deep end of the pool. 

Ross: I actually transferred from honors physics to AP physics but they didn’t have any more AP books. But my mom, not to be deterred, went to the University of Miami and got me a physics book.

But that physics book used calculus instead of dumb quadratic formulas and trigonometry that a high school book does so it really fit completely well. She has no idea what she did when she did. So I learned Maxwell’s equations in integral form in 11th grade.

Host: Maxwell’s equations are a set of partial differential equations that describe the behavior of electric and magnetic fields. To learn them in integral form in 11th grade on your own is quite an achievement. It requires thinking in calculus and understanding how vector fields behave.

Ross: I had just a book that was one level up but it was at the math level that I had so I could do it.

Host: That’s interesting serendipity. In high school, calculus is where I fell in love with math, because it was so weird and powerful. But later in the day, I’d go to physics and they didn’t use calculus, but in my mind, the gears are turning. It seems like it should apply here, but it never did.

Ross: There’s a rate! A rate of some sort going on.

Host: And so it was only at MIT when it all came together for me.

Ross: Oh, yeah, I think that really is a shame. I knew that I had this super textbook. And it basically had all the same chapters the high school textbook had. The high school textbook had these hacky formulas. Where does 1/2 at² come from? In my book, when I did the same thing, it would just be like, oh, and here’s how to get it from calculus.

Host: So let’s fast forward to the spring of ’91. You’re in 18.313 Probability. Had you met Rota before that class?

Ross: No. Now Rota sometimes taught in 18.03 differential equations, a section, but no, I didn’t know who this guy was and actually, for years after, I still didn’t know who that guy was.

I was there with a friend and we would just watch how he came in, the way he wore three glasses.

Host: One pair each to see the chalkboard, his notes, and his students.

Ross: [sfx: soda can opening] He insisted on having a diet Coke, ready for him at all times, cold, fresh from the machine or whatever.

Host: He also gave Hershey bars to students who asked sharp questions.

Ross: He would take a painstaking amount of time to just clean the board thoroughly before he began his lecture.

Host: I sat in that class for a couple of weeks drawn by the allure of Rota. It was like walking into a performance art session.

Ross: His lectures were always very well-prepared. [sfx: writing on chalkboard] He would write something and then he’d slide the chalkboard up and write the next thing, raise that up, move on to the middle chalk boards, fill them in, raising things up all the time, until he had filled up nine sliding chalkboards worth of stuff. And then the hour was over.

Host: Rota laid the foundation for combinatorics, establishing it as a respected field of study and inspiring generations of mathematicians. I believe he is also the only professor at MIT to have had a joint appointment in Mathematics and Philosophy.

Let’s start with a probability question that you have an intuition for.

Ross: So it went like this. He was talking about different ways that people think about probability on the integers.

Host: Suppose I ask you, “What are the chances of picking an even number from the set of integers?”

Ross: Well, we want to say 50%.

Host: That’s correct as everyone intuitively knows, but as Ross explains, it isn’t so obvious how to calculate it.

Ross: It’s very difficult to make that 50% stick when you’re talking about an infinite number of integers. There are an infinite number of even numbers. There are an infinite number of integers. Infinity over infinity, that’s equal to one half. How do you make that work? How do you make sense of a statement like that?

He talked about ways that people made sense of it. The easiest way is that you say, “I have the set of numbers and I want to figure out what’s the probability that a random number lies in that set. Let’s just cut everything off at 10,000. Forget everything in your set that goes past 10,000. I count how many and  divide by 10,000.

Okay, all right. Let’s go ahead to a million. You know how many, divide by a million. These are all nice numbers, go to a billion, a trillion, whatever. If that converges on something, then we say, “Okay that’s the probability.”

But if you try and use the axioms of probability, like and-ing an or-ing, you multiply two independent events, all the things we’re supposed to do with algebra in probability, none of that’s going to work if your definition of probability is this clunky sort of thing, just taking a limit all the time.

Host: For those that aren’t really into math, just hang on for a few more minutes and we’ll return to the human element. Understanding this next section is not needed for the remainder of the episode.

So, how do you approach this problem?

Ross: So he introduced something else. There’s a completely different way representing this sort of parameterized family of probabilities on the integers and it obeys all the laws because there’s a certain parameter in it that if this parameter is greater one, the distribution converges, like the total weight of the integers sums to something that’s finite so you have a finite denominator, right? So you’re going to have a finite numerator, everything’s finite, fine. It’s just a regular, old probability distribution as if you were dealing with finite sets.

But it’s a different way of getting there and it works with everything that you want. And then the expression you get at the end of the day, you have to take a limit in the parameter. As the limit exists, fine, you have an answer. If the limit doesn’t, then it doesn’t.

The way that you weight the integers is such that the sum weight of all the integers is the Riemann zeta function.

Okay. And he went through this. He went through why it works, how it works. And then at some point he wrote on the board, he said, “Okay, this is the Hurwitz zeta function.”

Host: Ross just mentioned 2 zeta functions, the Riemann and the Hurwitz.

The Riemann zeta function has this intriguing property that it reveals the distribution of the prime numbers.

It presents one of the most important unsolved problems in math and there’s a $1M bounty from the Clay Mathematics Institute for anyone who can prove or disprove the Riemann Hypothesis, which states that all non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function lie along a critical line.

Researchers have checked the first 10 trillion non-trivial zeros by brute force using computers and so far, all lie on the critical line. Not a single one strays outside. And these zeroes are intimately connected with the distribution of prime numbers.

Seems promising, right? Yes, but 10 trillion is not even a drop in the ocean of infinity.

The reason why you should care is that factoring enormously large numbers as the product of primes is the basis of modern encryption, and therefore your digital security and privacy.

The Riemann zeta function is a special case of the Hurwitz zeta function, the function that Ross worked with. 

Okay, we’re now finally ready to unveil that passing comment Rota made about the unsolved problem.

Ross: Rota said, “I don’t know of any probabilistic interpretation of the Hurwitz zeta function.”

Host: This simple comment from Rota inspired Ross to take up the challenge. Note that Ross is not hunting for prime numbers here. Rather, he is attempting to view the Hurwitz zeta function through the lens of probability. 

Ross: All right, there has to be something. We could probably work something out. That evening, I went over the notes. He sketched out a little proof about that result of how you get one half for the probability of an even number or an odd number, that sort of thing. How it converges on the density of your number set.

Host: So when you went home, was it like the movies? You were struck by lightning with inspiration? Where are you cranking hard? Like, how long was that process of working it out before you thought you had something?

Ross: I think it just took an evening. I was sitting on my waterbed. I had a waterbed in Senior House. I think I was the only person who did. I inherited it from a previous resident and I was just working there. I think the window was open. It was a little cold, yeah, just grinding away there.

It was a lot of just teasing apart, looking for analogies in the sketch that he had given about how the zeta function worked. And just seeing where I could make a similar turn. There’s a lot of unpeeling of the definitions and then there’s one trick in the middle.

I wound up with something. So the next class, that Friday, I said, “Here, this is the probabilistic interpretation of the Hurwitz zeta function. Here’s an expression.”

And he said, “Okay, nobody’s ever done this before. You should talk to me later.” And I was like, “Okay, let’s talk later.”

And I met with him in his office. We talked about it some more. Now you have to understand, this is my sophomore year and I don’t know how to write math.

Host: Ross offered an interesting take on the psychology of mathematical writing, which made me smile.  

Ross: I certainly had a very motivational, reasoning for how this works, but he wanted to work with me to get this into a much better form that sounds like it was written by a mathematician.

You know, that doesn’t have the sort of, “Now we do this and now we do this,” which is usually like how we think about math when we’re grinding things out whereas the mathematician always has to express himself as if he’s just stumbling across things.

“And this suddenly appears, and we can see this, right?” And you’re busy seeing, observing, and noting rather than actually pushing the equation around and twisting it about. I learned how to write and arrive at the result in a proper way.

Host: Ross published his solution in the Advances in Mathematics journal as a sole author. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

You worked on this in your free time. It wasn’t assigned and you had problem sets and everything else going on. Why were you drawn into this?  

Ross: I certainly thought it would be really interesting to see if I could do something with it. And I don’t remember feeling really behind in other work. But it was certainly a more fun thing to try and explore than anything else that was around. It was more like very fun crossword puzzle or toy to play with.

Host: Ross indicates that he didn’t feel like he was behind, but it turns out he had a lot going on. He was actually pursuing a quadruple major. More on this later.

At the end of the day, Ross had a humble take on his achievement.

Ross: I had solved an unsolved problem. I more think that nobody really tried before and that’s why I was able to do it. I would say it was an unsolved problem of somewhat lesser importance.

Host: Did he make an announcement to the class that you had solved that problem?

Ross: No, it wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t that much of a contest.

Host: Did you sense you had arrived on the scene with the course 18 department after publishing that paper?

Ross: I don’t think anybody in course 18 noticed me besides Rota. I’m not sure it made much difference.

Host: No glory to be found here.

Ross: Now you see after I had that result, then Rota told me the conjecture he really wanted to solve, which is something called the basis conjecture.

He said, “Can you do this one?” I can’t do the basis conjecture. Nobody’s done the basis conjecture. I’m glad I stopped trying to work on the basis conjecture because no one has gotten it. 

But that’s not really the interesting thing. The interesting thing is that once I started working with Rota, I was on the map of the Rota people.

Host: Yes.

Ross: There was a little group of Rota people who would take all of his classes and I took all of his classes and I would visit him socially. I’ve been over to his apartment with some other, like, Rota fans. He would cook us spaghetti dinner. He would sometimes take the gang out to Henrietta’s Table in Harvard Square, which was amazingly fancy for me. Have you been to Henrietta’s Table?

Host: Yes, but not as a student.

Ross: Okay, you can be quite awestruck if you’re starving undergraduate and someone takes you there for Sunday brunch.

Host: Did your association with him change the way you viewed the world or yourself?

Ross: Other people around me were like, “Oh, you’re friends with Rota.” I was young. He was just this guy. I didn’t know that he was famous or anything. I actually wish I’d taken more advantage of knowing this guy because in my thirties, I read his book Indiscrete Thoughts in which he just describes the history of the MIT math department in the fifties and sixties. And I thought that was really interesting. And I had the guy sitting in front of me. He would mention certain things occasionally about some mathematician somewhere.

Here’s a strange story though. So ‘96, they had the Rotafest. This is the one I went to.

Host: Rotafest was a 4 day a four-day mathematical conference held at MIT in 1996 to celebrate Rota’s 64th birthday.

Ross: It’s a ghoulish story but these posters are all up. Like Rotafest, Rotafest.

Rota traveled a lot, so sometimes he just wasn’t around or took sabbaticals or whatever. I wasn’t seeing him around and I had a good friend, the guy who was taking the probability class, so I had known him since then and he was like, “Yeah. I haven’t seen him around.”

Why are they having a Rotafest? Oh, wait a second. We haven’t seen him around and there celebrating his career. Oh my God! He’s dead!

Some of my friends, I’m like, “Let’s see. What evidence do we have?”

[music in]

Let’s go to his office. His office is locked. The lights are off. Okay, I went to his office again today. His office is locked. The lights are off.

We didn’t know what was going on so finally I actually sent Rota an email that said, “There’s this Rotafest going on. You’re still alive…aren’t you?”

[music out]

And he wrote back and said, “That’s not very funny.”

Maybe that was a rude thing to say. I didn’t know what else to do, you know?

Host: When you interacted with him, you didn’t have that feeling of distance. This is a God-like being and I’m just an undergrad. You were pretty free and open.

Ross: Yeah, yes here’s a man in his sixties. I’m a kid in his twenties. So young people don’t know how to interact with old people. I know this now that I’m an old person. It’s very strange so I was probably just strange.

But yeah, here’s this guy. He would invite us over. We went out for a movie once after Henrietta’s Table, all right.

Host: What movie did you see?

Ross: We saw Unforgiven with Clint Eastwood.

Host: Okay. How random.

Ross: He enjoyed it.

Host: Unfortunately, Ross’ association with Professor Rota came to a premature end. That seemingly flippant email he sent earlier was prescient.

Ross: He died shortly after I graduated. I got my PhD in ’98. He died in the spring of ’99.

One thing that struck me about Rota was that he lived alone. And all of us Rota  groupies wondered, “Is he married? Was he married? Is he widowed?” Of course, you don’t ask these questions, but we would spread rumors between each other.

And, yeah, I found out Googling this week that, oh, he had been married and he was divorced. His wife was at least alive when he died. He didn’t have any children. Okay, but none of us knew this. He never said anything about his actual personal life.

I was sad when I heard that the only way that people knew he’d had a heart attack and died was that he didn’t show up at a conference that he was supposed to go to. And a few days later somebody went into his apartment and found him dead. And that sounded lonely.

Host: So, Ross, let’s switch back to you. You have a whopping five MIT degrees, a quadruple major as an undergrad, and then a PhD in math. And it looks like you got your first four undergrad degrees in four years. What were they?

Ross: I got CS, EE, physics, and math.

Host: Oh, so you are Course 6-1, 6-3, 8, and 18. That is truly phenomenal.

Ross: I’m a good combiner. You know how people combine foods in order to [get] whatever dietary results they want. Well, if I take this class at the same time as they take that class, they cover pretty much similar things and I might do this with this and yeah, you can stack things up. And all you have to do is just keep track of all these.

Host: In order to do that, you must have tested out of a gazillion things coming in?

Ross: I had about 90 units of credit from AP. Yeah, yeah, I think so. Let’s see, I had AP chemistry. I had AP physics. I had AP calculus, but oh, no, but I didn’t use it. I had two different AP Englishes, the composition and the lit. 

Host: Okay, so that’s basically freshman year in a way. Standard workload is 48 units per semester so that’s 96. You came in with 90.

Ross: I think I came in with 90. That’s the rough number.

Host: Were you in classes with upperclassmen right away?

Ross: Some of it, yeah, because I tested, that’s right, I had tested out of both Physicses, AP Physics 1 and AP Physics 2. Like I said, I had Maxwell’s equations in 11th grade. I didn’t quite understand what that little triangle was, because I didn’t know them in differential form, but I could still just figure it out from context.

Host: Let me clarify a bit as there is something quite remarkable in all of this. Already ahead of his time, Ross had learned Maxwell’s equations in integral form in high school. In order to receive credit for electromagnetism at MIT, he had to take a placement exam when he arrived on campus as a freshman. The only catch was that the equations in the exam were written in differential form. That’s what Ross meant earlier when he said he didn’t quite understand what that little triangle was.

Ross: Even though I got the AP credit, you still had to take a test that MIT would give you to get out of E&M, but I passed that test.

Host: Ross took an exam where he couldn’t decipher the equations being shown to him but he understood the subject matter so well that he reasoned his way through the problem statements and solved them using what he did know, the integral form of the equations. At the end of the day, both sets of equations are identical so you get the same answer, but the notation is different.

You’re definitely an outlier with the amount that you absorbed. Do you find that has generalized to other things like learning music or things that are non-math related? Curious.

Ross: Yeah, I pick up things very quickly.

Host: Okay, can you give me an example of something?

Ross: So recently, I’ve re-picked up piano. For the first time in 30 years, I’m living in enough space to actually sit in a room by myself with a keyboard and a piano as well. So I had two years, fifth and sixth grade, but I just wasn’t that interested in what I was learning and how I was learning it.

And now I said, “Okay, now I can start figuring out how to play things again.” And I looked things up on YouTube and then I get some sheet music, and like recently I’ve been able to Schubert’s Ave Maria. That’s been my latest thing.

Okay, and I challenged myself. I’m going to play Havana but with a really complicated baseline. And then I can spend weeks getting it wrong until I get it right, but all through the process, I keep learning about chords, chord structure, things like that.

And then again, if I have a question, I go to YouTube and I find out how all that fits together. And this is the sort of thing that I would have liked to have learned when I was in fifth and sixth grade taking piano class.

But instead in piano class, at least the way that I was taught, they treat you like a computer. [sfx: simple piano sequence] They hand you a sheet of notes and they say, “Type this and type it well,” and that’s all there was. I finally figured out what a chord is.

What I’ve learned about piano is all it takes is practice, but you must practice. You only get better with practice and if you practice, you will get better.

That’s a beautiful symmetry: whatever you put into it, you will get out of it. And then I began figuring out how guitar works, but I’m not going to play guitar. That looks too painful.

Host: What inspires you? What puts you in that space where you’re like, “Yes, I really want to do this!”  

Ross: That’s a good question. Some of it is just you think, “Okay, anybody can do this.” In 2008, I wanted to really understand what had happened in the Great Depression because the stock market was crashing and we were all freaked out.

And then I just became a history buff. I read dozens of books and with history, there’s always something new to find out or a different opinion or somebody like glossed over this area. Sometimes, I just plunge into something and then just suck up everything I can.

Host: If you could solve another unsolved math problem, which one would it be?  

Ross: I would love to solve the Collatz conjecture. Such a simple little dynamical system. No one’s been able to do it.

Host: There’s a wonderful video, I think Veritasium, that YouTube channel, on the Collatz conjecture and, basically, the refrain throughout this entire video is an older mathematician telling a younger one, “Do not waste your time on this problem.”

Ross: Yeah. And I would sometimes waste my time on that problem. Just, okay, how far out can I go? What can I say? But yeah, it’s a very easy-to-state problem and there’s just nothing you could do.

Host: I won’t describe the Collatz conjecture here. Check out the show notes for an absolutely brilliant, entertaining video about the failed attempts. This one is worth watching with your kids. Let’s say 9th grade or older. For some reason, kids often think that math is a settled field with nothing new to be done but this video will refute that misconception.

Given the way you at an early age absorbed a lot of advanced subjects, any thoughts on how you would change teaching of these subjects to high schoolers?

Ross: You have to align your physics book with calculus. That was a must for me, as you had the experience too, okay. You just have to align that. If most students are taking calculus their senior year, then they better be taking physics their senior year and the book should respect that.

My daughter is in fifth grade and she’s gonna be going to middle school. So I went to an open house and I got to see what the math curriculum pathways look like in the state of Florida.

And they’ve done something there that I like, which is that you don’t necessarily go into trigonometry and calculus. After you finish your algebra two, you’ve got probability and statistics. You’ve got linear algebra. You’ve got all these other things. There’s a lot more diversity and options post algebra two. So I would’ve recommended that people get these things.

Host: What message would you like to convey to those interested in math or science?

Ross: Remember that textbook story? I ended up patterning my undergraduate life on that. I realized that with the right textbook in your hand, with someone who speaks to you in your language or presents the problem your way, you can go a lot further than, perhaps, the crappy book that you were assigned to buy.

I would go to Wordsworth and I would look around there and I would find a different book. I didn’t know the subject, but I’d look at the table of contents, see that it’s the same stuff, read a little bit of it. See if you like the style better or worse and I’d just go ahead and buy it. And then when you have a question, because you didn’t understand the assigned book, you’d go to the other one. You can have multiple opinions, all right.

Don’t get your information just from where they want you to get your information.

Host: Such great advice. I suppose everyone uses YouTube now for that but back then, we tended to stick to the required text.

So here’s a silly question because you majored in essentially everything but if you had to do MIT all over again, what would you study?

Ross: Well, I liked what I studied. I think it is the same answer. Yeah, I’m pretty happy with it.

This was advice that I gave students when I was an upperclassman. I said, “Every term, take a class that you really wanna take. Give yourself a reason to get out of bed. Don’t have four required classes. Make sure that one class you’re taking is a class that you really have something that you’re really interested in and you’re not just grinding through your requirements.”

Host: That’s wonderful and something I didn’t do. I grinded through requirements.

[music in]

After finishing his quadruple major, it’s no surprise that Ross couldn’t limit himself to just one topic during his math PhD. His doctoral thesis concerned nonlinear eigenvalue problems and spanned numerical approaches to linear algebra, optimization under quadratic constraints, as well as wavelets.

[music out]

Throughout this research, he focused on making computation faster and more efficient, which is the common thread that runs throughout his non-academic career. Whether his prior work in computational biology or his current work with the financial markets, Ross has brought numerous innovations to market that lie at the intersection of computer science and math.

As I began work on this episode, human brilliance was the obvious theme but as I progressed, I discovered something mysterious and surprising underneath the surface: There exists a state of being that is simultaneously intense and focused yet relaxed and joyful. Ross exemplifies this. Recall that he referred to working on the Hurwitz zeta function as “a new toy to play with.”

[music in]

We can do this too! So take time to explore your curiosity with the innocence you had as a child.

Choose happiness. See you next time.

[music out]

Lilly: I didn’t really realize how big of a deal Jeopardy! is to the American conscience. I originally wanted to be doing biology in medicine with engineering and that sort of changed over time. I think Jeopardy! is this culmination of when those hopes and dreams started to fracture into reality.

Host: That’s Lillian Chin, MIT Class of 2017, SM 2019, and current PhD student, Course 6, Random Hall, and East Campus.

[music in]

In 2017, during her senior year, Lilly achieved national fame by winning the college championship on the Jeopardy! game show. In a moment of mischief, in order to get Alex Trebek to say something he’s never said before, she delivered a Final Jeopardy response about memes, only to realize later, to her horror, that she had become a meme, an object of the internet that could be manipulated in any way. This episode is about the unintended consequences of fame and one woman’s attempt to contend with the dark forces of the internet.

I’m Ravi Patil. And this is Institrve, true stories about MIT, a trove of wonder discovery and madness. This podcast explores the diversity of the human experience. The question of what it means to be human is a timeless one. By hearing the stories of others, we just may find a piece of ourselves and be inspired to transcend our own limitations.

[music out]

Before we dive into Jeopardy!, let’s explore Lilly’s background.

Was there a childhood moment when you experienced the wonder of science?

Lilly: So I remember as a kid reading Magic School Bus books and there’s one where they shrink the magic school bus down and they explore inside the human body. And one of the lead ups is where one of the kids swabs their cheek cells and puts it under the microscope. And I remember showing my parents, “Oh, this is so cool!” And because my parents are neuroscientists, we just went to the lab and did the experiment.

My parents are immigrants from China and Taiwan. They actually met in Iowa of all places. I really grew up in their lab.

Science isn’t just something that you do in books. It’s you; it’s around you. And I think that really inspired me to explore more.

Host: And did you want to study biology at MIT?

Lilly: It became clear that I was interested in electronics and mechanical things, which my parents didn’t really have as much experience with but they were excited to support me.

And this was always the goal of doing neural prosthetics. Prosthetics that can actually communicate by brain to things. So that was the big dream. I think that really put me on the track to interdisciplinary research.

And I’ve continued sort of this interdisciplinary approach in my current robotics research. It’s already very multidisciplinary, of electrical engineering, computer science, mechanical. I’m trying to bring in material science, but even more broadly, I’m trying to bring in a lot of things from media studies, science, technology, society, into robotics.

Host: During her senior year at MIT, Lilly put her trivia knowledge to the test by auditioning for Jeopardy!, but let’s rewind a bit. [sfx: tape rewinding] During her childhood, Lilly’s father watched Jeopardy! to better grasp American cultural references as he was puzzled why some jokes on Johnny Carson were getting so many laughs. So Jeopardy! became part of the family.

Lilly: You get your dinner and then we have family dinner in front of the TV watching Jeopardy!

Host: How does one get on Jeopardy!?

Lilly: You first do an online test and then if you do well enough on that, you get invited to in-person auditions.

And so the in-person auditions are actually how good you’re going to be on camera. Can you follow directions? Do you have an extroverted personality. People don’t usually think of Jeopardy! contestants as the most charismatic but there is a selection process.

For some reason, they decided that there was going to be a dance off. I do a lot of dancing in my spare time, I was just like, “Yeah, I’m probably not going to get picked. Let’s just like dance.” And I’m like 90% sure that’s why I got picked because even months afterwards, Maggie, the contestant coordinator was like, “Oh, you dance so well.”

Host: A Course 6er busting the dance moves. I like it!

Lilly: Yeah. I auditioned in October 2016 and then by December 2016, I had gotten the call of “Hey, you’re going to come to LA in a month.” Then, it’s off to the races pretty much.

Host: So you’ve made it to the college championship tournament. How is it structured?

Lilly: They already have 15 people picked out. The first week of games, there’s five games being played. The five winners of each game will get to move on. And then the next four highest money totals will be wildcards and then move to the semifinals. So that’s the first round. So it’s mostly just making sure that your money is high enough past historical cutoffs.

Then the next three days are semifinals and that’s just single elimination. Only the winner gets to move on. Then the last two days are a two-part final. So it’s your score on the first day added with your score to the second. I think the expected value of doing the college tournament is much better because one, you don’t have to pay for your flights and your hotel room (most people don’t know if you’re on the regular show, you have to put that upfront). Two, you get a minimum amount that you get paid. You have this on the regular show too, but it’s much less than what’s on the tournament.

Host: All said and done, how many games did you play? You have the two from the final and then how many before that?

Lilly: So I only played 4 games and also one week of filming is done in one day. I was the first game. And so I was just like, “Oh, I’m here. Now I’m done.” But even just doing that, I was exhausted going back to the hotel.

If you’re on the regular show, you only get five minutes between each game, so you’d be filming for the entire day. And that’s also why the cutoff to getting to the tournament of champions is win five games. You’re coming off of the high of the first game that you’ve won. And then it’s “Okay, now do this four more times.” And that’s an entire day.

Host: I’ve heard a critical element of Jeopardy! is mastering the timing of the buzzer. [sfx: buzzer]

Lilly: For pretty much all of the questions, everybody knows the answers and all that’s the difference is how you buzz in. It doesn’t look like that to the home audience.

Since the question is just all on the screen and you can’t interrupt, Alex, the person who’s reading it, you have to wait until the end. There’ll be some lights that come on right after Alex finishes the question and that light unlocks the system so that everybody can buzz in. Actually, if you buzz in earlier before the cue, you will get delayed. And since everybody pretty much knows the answer, there’s no benefit for going in fast. Just buzzer speed is critical.

Host: Ah. Okay. So your timing it as soon as you see the light, you basically hit the buzzer.

Lilly: Yeah. I would go off of Alex’s voice rather than the light, but yeah, people have different things they do.

Host: So you’ve made it through day one and then the semifinals, which meant you qualified for the two-game final. Game two is going well and you’re faced with Final Jeopardy.

Lilly: That was the most double-check piece of arithmetic that I’d done, because I was like, I think I have a lockout based on the two-day total.

Host:  The Final Jeopardy topic was 17th century Germans.

The answer is astronomer who began his epitaph, “I used to measure the heavens. Now I shall measure the shadows of the earth.” Remember to phrase your response in the form of a question. Instead of playing the actual Jeopardy! jingle, here’s a non-copyright infringing substitute.

[music in]

[music out]

If you answered who is Johannes Kepler, you are correct. Congratulations!  Lilly knew the answer, but decided to give an alternate response, a clever, internet savvy answer that would come to plague her later.

Lilly: I had thought about this beforehand. There would be a chance that there would be a lockout game and lots of people have done this in the past of putting a funny answer down. I want to say dank memes but I’m not sure how much the censors will be happy about that.

So I’ll do spicy memes. Then the “Who is?” format. So I was like, oh, okay. I’ll just do “Who is the spiciest memelord?”

Host: “Who is the spiciest memelord?” would eventually get all kinds of laughs from Lilly’s peers but it would also get the internet stark side revving. More on that later.

So you’ve just won you shake hands with Alex, you get your trophy. Did you go back to the hotel room and checkout?

Lilly: No, we gotta film more b-roll! We got to have the awkward YouTube video of me explaining what a memelord is to the 65 year olds in the audience. And then, there’s a cast party. It’s finally a chance where everybody finally got to relax but then at the end we’re like, “Hey, who wants to go get dinner?”

We don’t have to wear the college sweatshirts anymore. And we’re just going out to a CityWalk, where we were put being put up. And just getting to talk to other people, like normal college students, that was really nice.

Host: Lilly takes a flight back to Boston from LA and joins the rest of MIT for Independent Activities Period (IAP). But remember, Jeopardy! is a pre-recorded show and she couldn’t reveal the results to anyone. Otherwise, she’d forfeit her 100 K payday.

You get back to East Campus and your hallmates on Tetazoo have no idea what’s happened.

Lilly: Yeah.

Host: How long was the wait between when you had won and it being announced?

Lilly: Six weeks.

And then it’s also stretched out over time. It was two days of filming for me, but for my friends, they’re like, oh, they’re watching every day. Cause they want to see who my competitors are and things like that.

I was actually doing grad school visits at the time. So when the tournament was airing, I visited Stanford and one of the other contestants, Viraj, is also at Stanford. So we met up and I think I went to his frat and he was joking. He was like, “Ah, she won the whole thing!” and I was like, “No, don’t say it. I want my money.”

Yeah. But that was also wild of going around the country and seeing my friends from Stanford and they were also hyped to see me on air.

Host: Was this the most difficult secret you’ve had to keep in your life?

Lilly: I don’t know about most difficult secret. That seems like a high bar.

Host: Interesting how life comes full circle. Lilly’s father originally watched Jeopardy! to understand American culture. I’m imagining him having dinner on the couch watching his daughter on the very same game show, yet not grasping the reference to a memelord. But Lilly was just a phone call away.

Lilly: My parents didn’t realize how big of a thing this was until it was starting to show and it was like, “Oh, you’re on TV.” And then they’re badgering me about how it’s going. And then my boyfriend is very sweet and so he wasn’t bothering me, but he saw me filling out some press forms, peeking over my shoulder.

Host: As Lilly waited anxiously for her episodes to air, she had a growing sense of dread [sfx: brooding sound] about her impending fame due to a comment from a fellow contestant.

Lilly: It was literally at the cast party at the end of shooting where the contestant Julia from Georgetown. She was like, “Oh, your answer was really funny. You’re going to get so many hits on Buzzfeed.” And I was like, oh crap. I literally did not think about this at all.

So it was definitely six weeks of marinading. Of just really thinking about the consequences of my actions but still not really registering how it was going to really feel.

One of the articles written by Talia Levin called a “Big Tits for 600” was just documenting the harassment that you’re going to face as a female contestant on Jeopardy! Once I joined the alumni network, there were like, “Welcome to women of Jeopardy! Here’s how you two factor all of your accounts.”

Host: Two factor authentication is simply adding another layer of security to your online accounts. For example, if you log into your bank account and it sends you a text message with a code, that is the second factor beyond your initial password. We’ll explore online security and privacy in another episode.

Lilly: But there’s just no infrastructure anticipating that this is going to happen.

That you need to protect yourself, otherwise, this is going to get really bad. And there was just that anxiety. Jeopardy! is from a different time. They put your first name, last name, what school you go to, where your hometown is, and your year in school. So you can back solve my age from that. That’s an incredible amount of information to be put on there to the point where we’d call that like being doxxed on the internet. All your personal information.

And sure enough, we got letters to my parents’ house. It’s fan mail but please do not contact me at my house. I got a random text from someone. And I was like, “Oh, hey, thanks for congratulating me. I don’t think I have your number.” And they’re like, “Huh, I just found your number online.” And I’m like, “That’s creepy.” And they’re like, “Yeah, bye!”

And so it’s that kind of things that you’re not really expecting.

I made a harassment bingo card for myself of just guessing what kind of slurs I was going to get called. I have a weird sense of humor.

Host: Oh, no. How bad did it get?

Lilly: On my first night seeing what the subreddit was saying about me.

“Oh, Lilly literally looks like a person who would go to MIT.” And I just read this and I just started laughing because it was so petty, of just like these people who think that they know me from this little sliver of literally 20 minutes of television. And they think they know me and can comment enough about me.

And so then all this stuff of “Oh, Lilly looks like a boy with a woman’s voice. Oh, really? I think she looks like a girl but with a man’s voice. How strange.” And just seeing all these things are like very petty. It just felt really funny to me.

Host: The college Jeopardy! finals featured all Asian contestants, two Chinese Americans and one Indian American. This also attracted racist comments.

Lilly: I’ve written in my blog post I was starting to think about all the things happening.

“Do not write an academic paper about this, Lilly, you don’t need to do this.” But then obviously here I am with my academic paper written.

Host: In addition to her engineering workload, Lilly took time to publish an academic paper on public failings. Not public shamings, but public famings. A word she coined to describe involuntary celebrification. I’ve added a link to this paper in the show notes. You’ll find many examples of the harassment Lilly endured. Examples include an image of being sexually assaulted by President Biden and John Travolta at the same time, as well as body horror, a photo of Lilly where her head was replaced by an open clam shell.

Lilly: I didn’t realize that I was getting just straight up harassed until I got invited to the Tournament of Champions.

Host: This took place 11 months after Lilly’s original victory in the college championship.

Lilly: And so this was November 2017 when it aired. I was with my friends and I was like, “Oh, let’s see all the harassment, like what everybody said. And it’ll be funny.”

But as I was compiling the comments, people were just nice. They weren’t talking about who I was personally. They were just comparing, “Oh, she should have gotten these questions. She should have done her betting strategy.”

And I actually started crying because I wasn’t expecting people to just be nice to me on the internet. I had built up this armor of humor as a defense mechanism for this harassment that didn’t come. I had realized I’d built up all of this armor for nothing. I was not prepared for it. This should be the experience of going on the internet. You shouldn’t be expecting people to say all of these nasty things to you just because you were on television.

I always keep forgetting this. So early drafts of me presenting my paper to people, I was just like, “Oh, yeah. And then people said all this stuff about me. And everyone was like, “This is horrifying. I’m so sorry that you went through all this.”

Host: It may seem strange, but a person being harassed may not realize it right away. It can take time to admit to yourself that you’re being harassed.

Lilly: And I’m just like, oh, huh, this is harassment. This is why I use language of trauma and processing to describe these experiences.

Host: Part of the reason why Lilly didn’t admit to being harassed is that she also enjoyed the benefits of being a Jeopardy! champion.

Lilly: It’s really hard to see at the time because this is nominally a positive thing.

I made lots of money. I got fame. I got recognition that translated even into professional success by getting special access to speaking engagements and things like that. Part of being a researcher is not just putting out good research but having a name and a reputation that people could be like, “Oh, I recognize you.”

And I had research collaborators be like, “Oh, you’re the Jeopardy! girl.” That’s part of any sort of recognition that I get is helping people remember my name and then hopefully look at my research. So it’s hard to say, right?

When you’re having this nominally positive thing happening to you to be like, “No, this was really crappy and even hard for myself.”

Host: What complicated Lilly’s ability to process everything that happened was the difficulty in accessing her memories given the intensity of her experience.

Lilly: I don’t have strong memories of that time in January 2017. And so the only official record is what is edited, those episodes. I’m very glad that I have contemporaneous blog posts about it because I wouldn’t remember otherwise. I read those posts and they’re really funny, but I think it’s also this recognition I should call a spade and this was harassment that took awhile for me to really understand.

Host: I find it fascinating how you translated this harassment into “Isn’t this funny. Ha ha!” Just laughing it off.

Lilly: I got interviewed by the Comparative Media Studies department probably March or April 2017. And I only realized then because the interviewer there also commented, “It’s really weird that Lilly keeps using the word funny to describe these experiences.”

And that’s what caused me to take a closer look at why I keep on saying this. And then, November 2017 was the Tournament of Champions. That really set it.

If there’s anything that I’ve learned from this Jeopardy! experience, that it’s the importance of narratives, right? It’s how you portray it and how you or someone else will take bare facts and then turn them into something that services their own narrative.

Host: Any examples?

Lilly: Being used by large institutions, like Sony Pictures and MIT to have their narrative of star student. “Hello fellow kids, please listen to us.”

At the same time as this internet thing where I’m a media object. I’m up for debate. My feelings about this don’t matter because I am now in the public sphere to be discussed at will and these sort of simultaneous things makes it hard to process.

It makes me try to have distance with humor to depersonalized from myself. To treat myself as a media object, like to write a whole paper about myself, of “That’s not really Lilly. That’s some other person who just has the same name and face as me.”

Host: Could you describe why Jeopardy! loved your spiciest memelord answer so much.

Lilly: I don’t have any evidence for this. This is my cynicism talking. But part of the reason why these tournaments happened at the times they do is because there’s a thing called, sweeps or something. I don’t remember, but it’s a TV term of when the Nielsen Rating Families are going to watch the show and determine how popular it is.

And Jeopardy! is a show that is popular among 65 plus audience. The core demographic that is good for advertising to is 18 to 35. So that’s why having younger people on the show is a good thing.

And then when the spiciest memelord thing happened, they were really excited about it. They put an Instagram filter out. They put all of these ads. They even had a picture of myself with “Deal With It” sunglasses on that said, “This could be you.” And a lot of my friends got this ad and also it was on our /r/Hello Fellow Kids, which is a subreddit to mock overreaching efforts of boomers to appeal to the youths.

I also wondered why was I getting invited to MIT Corporation dinners and stuff like that? And the cynical part of me is “Oh, somebody gave MIT a lot of money because I was on the show.” That they were really excited to see this positive representation.

I think that one is more conspiracy theory because I’ve had some friends who have ears into more senior administration being like, “No, just as MIT wants to celebrate the achievements when the faculty gets a Nobel Prize, we want to celebrate this achievement.”

Host: Let’s dive into your paper a bit. What’s the difference between a celebrity and microcelebrity?

Lilly: A traditional celebrity is who you’re expecting, like movie stars and famous pop artists and stuff. There’s something that we’ve deemed as celebrity, a special class of people. It’s been unclear what celebrity really means as we get onto the internet. So you no longer have the traditional gatekeepers. It takes a lot of money to get TV cameras and the TV studio to put this altogether. Instead, now with the internet, all you need is a webcam and you can be a YouTuber and all you need is a microphone to become a podcaster.

Host: Roger that on just needing a mic to become a podcaster.

Lilly: So starting in the 2010s, you start having Instagram influencers, YouTubers, people who are able to have this large audience, but that is still limited. And that’s micro-celebrity.

With new ways that people can access media markets, you might not be famous to everybody, but you could be famous to a specific set of people, but have the same cultural cachet as say, George Clooney does.

What I talk about in my paper is that there’s this whole category of even tinier celebrity fames, like being famous for a very brief amount of time. And I use the term public faming to describe this.

Host: A well-known example of a public faming is Alex from Target. The example is instructive and happened seven years ago, Alex was a handsome teenager working at Target bagging items in the checkout line, just doing his his job. A girl snapped a photo of him without him knowing and posted it on Tumbler. A week later, another teenage girl stumbled upon the photo and tweeted it with the following caption “YOOOOOOOOOOO” in all caps. The tweet went viral in minutes. Alex would appear on Ellen Degeneres’ talk show shortly thereafter.He and his family would also receive death threats. All for what? Simply doing his job, minding his own business. Here’s another example.

Lilly: I think the most well-known one is Ken Bone who asked a question during the 2016 presidential debates and then got insanely popular. “Who is this man? Why is he wearing a nice sweater?” But it’s not for any particular reason but it’s just suddenly being elevated to this.

Host: While Ken was offered some praise, he was also turned into a meme. His red sweater outfit was reportedly turned into a sexy Halloween costume. He was also offered a porn contract. All for what? Asking a genuine question about energy policy during the Clinton-Trump debates.

Lilly: I just showed up on television and said something funny. It’s not really a lasting sort of fame, but what I argue in my paper is that it’s still worthy of study because there’s still a real person behind there. And it was nonconsensual to suddenly have this fame and be expected to deal with it.

Host: Could you describe some recommendations for reclaiming your own narrative?

Lilly: The theoretical kind of intervention that I had made is called “radical reciprocity.”

There’s other terms like counter shaming which Signe Uldbjerg uses to describe how survivors of sexual assault tried to reclaim their narratives by counter shaming their aggressor.

But in this case, I had a more general term because it’s not just about shame or fame. It’s about reclaiming. In the paper, I talk about how there’s these two modes, which celebrity or microcelebrity can act. Celebrity is working on the temporality of scarcity. Microcelebrity is acting on this temporality of now and accessibility. These concepts come from Anne Jerslev in 2016’s paper.

So knowing that there’s these two different modes in which celebrity acts, what I say is you can fight against this by pulling out this Uno card and saying, “Ha, ha, reverse onto you.”

It’s using the same things that hurt me in these media forms. I reversed back to try to get back at what hurt me. So if we’re talking about institutions, they’re acting in this temporality of scarcity, of inaccessibility. And they do this because they’re like, “I’m MIT. I am well-known. I’m powerful. People, listen to what I have to say.”

So the sort of fight back on the same grounds. It’s “Hey, I’m famous now. I, Lilly Chin, am the spiciest memelord and I’m going to call you out on your things.” And so it’s using whatever position that you’ve gained to be like, “No, I am famous and I have a voice and I should speak out.”

This has the obvious pitfall. Nobody really needs to listen to me in the same way that these traditional institutions of power can be listened to but it is the smallest of soap boxes. And it’s something that you can stand on.

Host: So one way is to exercise your fame and speak out on issues that matter to you. You also had another approach.

Lilly: The other way that I tried to reclaim my narrative is by compiling all of the comments in the first place.

The people who are saying like, “Oh, Lilly is a C-word or something,” don’t expect to be put on blast. They don’t expect me to ever read this in the first place, but by taking it and by compiling it and seeing a pattern, it’s less of “Wow, a lot of people hate me” and it becomes “This particular person has issues.” It’s easier to write them off.

If it’s so easy to Google me, I’m going to do the same things against the people who are harassing me and show how harmful these platforms can make it.

Host: So when people were harassing you, they were direct messaging you, it wasn’t for the broader audience. And so you took it and posted it to the broader audience.

Lilly: I did not. Do I think people should go after and harass these people? No, absolutely not. Otherwise, aren’t you repeating the same cycles of violence?

But the one person who I do put on blast from my DMs is this one guy who would just not stop messaging. And then it culminated into a dick pic. And so, at first, I was just going to block him and move on with my life.

But then I had remembered people actually letting friends and family know that “Do you know that your friend is doing this?”

[sfx: stringed instrument]

Host: So Lilly turned the tables on her bully by identifying his friends and family and letting them know about his offensive behavior. But they didn’t believe her!

Lilly: They were like, “Oh no, I bet he’s gotten hacked. That can’t be.” And I’m like, “Look, he’s from California, I’m from Massachusetts. I would not find this guy unless there was a connection.” So he ended up blocking me which is funny probably to be like, “Oh, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

But I do have the caution that this is just straight up like cyber bullying. By being forced to work in what the platform has to offer, you do run the risk of violence. There needs to be systemic change rather than just retreading the same things.

But in the moment, when you’re just an individual, trying to keep your head above water, maybe it’s okay to do these things, but it is definitely a fine line.

Host: What takeaways do you want to leave behind for the audience?

Lilly: Things look given. This is the way that things are done, right? But cultures are not monolithic. A culture is made up of individual actions such as your own and you are an actor in a system. No matter how small you feel, your contribution is, you are making a difference. So it’s not just in dramatic situations like being on Jeopardy! It really just only takes a couple of people to speak out and be like, “This isn’t right” to make a difference. And obviously, the more voices that chime in, that’s when you start getting to a big culture shift.

Host: So make your voice heard.

Lilly: Yeah.

[music in]

Host: Lilly has spent a great deal of time reflecting on her fame and its wide ranging consequences.  Understanding the importance of narratives from her Jeopardy! experience, Lilly has used her voice to bring about change on campus.

I wish her the best of luck as she finishes her PhD research on robotics and I look forward to seeing how she furthers equity and ethical behavior in her career.

[music out]

[music in]

While we clearly see the beneficial aspects of the internet, the ease of passing judgment and instantly reaching a large audience also brings forward the worst of human behavior.

It’s up to all of us to reinforce civil interaction.

Choose happiness. See you next time.

[music out]