Diners were Catherine Williams, Alex Papazoglu, Sunil Chebolu, Zack Treisman, Kelly Jabbusch, Selim Tuncel (department chair), Tom Duchamp (graduate advisor), Jerry Folland, Zhenqing Chen, and Ginger Warfield.

This may well have been the most mellow dinner to date. And it may also have been one of the best for simple sharing of perspectives, without necessarily any immediately pinpointable outcomes.

Our initial topic arose from my (unfair) request of Catherine that she compare and contrast UW and the University of Texas, at which she just spent a year. The gist of her reply, not necessarily a contrast with Texas, was that this is a very pleasant department to be around. Students enjoy each other, mathematically and personally, and many faculty members are pretty approachable.Others (notably Zack) concurred. This led to some speculation about what causes these good relationships. One speculation point was that high prestige may correlate with higher pressure and fewer friendships. Jerry countered with the fact that a couple of his best friendships date back to graduate school in Princeton. In that case, though, there was a specific bonding agent -- there was nothing whatever to do in the vicinity, so graduate students did a lot of hanging out together. No other theory really held water either, though the current structure of the Math Lounge, complete with blackboards around the edge, most certainly gets some credit.

That worked us gently into our major topic of the evening, which was prelims. The topic went round and round and back and forth. Different (very different!) models at other universities came up, as well as different reactions to the ones here. Selim and Tom sketched some of the changes that have taken place over the past few years, and their objectives. Selim also described a possible modification that would permit a more seamless transition from prelim-study to research by allowing one of the prelims to be replaced with a really substantive two-quarter reading course. This met with fervent enthusiasm, even when he pointed out some of the difficulties in managing it. Other details, down to furniture arrangement in the examination room and dealing with typos, got their share of attention.

One of the notable features of the conversation was an absence: in past conversations there was invariably one advanced student who spoke feelingly about a state we eventually named "limbo". This was the situation in which after the intensity of studying for prelims, the fact of passing them left an almost total vacuum in the student's scheme of things. The result was a rootless sensation that could develop into downright panic unless the student had the good fortune to fall fairly swiftly for some thesis area. These comments were among the reasons for some of the changes that have been gradually taking place, so the fact that even mentioning it didn't cause any student to hail it as an articulation of an unmentioned emotion was extremely heartening.

In the final moments of the conversation various tales went around, all amusing and mostly not reproducible. One, however, decidedly needs preserving for posterity. It seems that one of our graduate students had the opportunity to pick up a cell phone for a quarter at a garage sale last summer. He did so, and then proceeded, on the first day of class, to plant a fellow graduate student in his class, with the phone set to ring in the middle of class. When it did, its "owner" got it out and began cheerfully murmuring his end of a conversation into it: "Sorry, can't talk, I'm in class. When can I call you back?....No? Well, how about...", at which point the TA wrested the phone from his hands and flung it out the third floor window , then banished the offending "student" with a parting comment of "And don't try to come back into this class!" After class he retrieved the phone from the bush into which he had carefully chucked it, and ran the whole rig a second time with a different plant. As far as anyone knows, no cell phone has rung in his class since!