The most affectionate QD readers know Little Miss Demosthenes very well. She leaves witty comments to my blog as well as others. I got to know her a bit over the internet. Won't say much about her to avoid invading her privacy here, but she is 14 years old, she loves mathematics (and she's darn good at it) and she's definitely bright.
Last week, in the process of giving the finishing touches to my proceedings paper for the Moriond QCD conference, I decided to test her. I sent her my draft paper, and invited her to proofread it and send back any suggestions she might have had about how to improve the paper. I offered to cite her in the Acknowledgements section if she ended up giving a sizeable contribution to the clarity of the paper.
After a few days, I was not surprised to get back a message with four scanned pages of my paper, and red pencil scribblings on it. Lo and behold, she had indeed found quite a few things to correct. The funny thing is, all her corrections were worth implementing, including a whole sentence she decided would sound better than my version, which was also a bit too apologetic. On the right is one of the scanned pages, just so you know I'm not making this up! :)
So I did implement her changes. You can find a copy of the paper at this link. I am going to send it to the Moriond QCD secretary tomorrow... The only thing still missing is Little Miss Demosthenes' real name for the Acknowledgements section!
Anyway, I decided I will hire her. She recently mentioned she'd like to be a Summer Student at Fermilab. It's going to happen some day.
Wait a minute...
Has anybody here actually really met Little Miss Demosthenes? I have a theory that she's really an MIT mathematics professor and she has elegantly pulled the wool over all of our eyes. OK, maybe not.
But I have a feeling that we're all going to be working for Demie some day.
8-)
Posted by: sam | May 11, 2005 at 06:20 AM
The nickname, almost obviously, points to the secret personalities held by the sister and brother of Ender, the protagonist of Orson Scott Card saga.
Posted by: Alejandro Rivero | May 11, 2005 at 06:52 AM
From my side: Just congratulations young miss.
Posted by: Helge | May 11, 2005 at 12:47 PM
Nope, Sam. She's real. At least, that I infer
from the email exchanges with her and the fact
that she visited Fermilab with her father a
month ago. Admittedly, I did not meet her, and
she could -just could- still be a fake. But I
tend to believe it would be too much work for her
to be worth the fun.
If she's a MIT professor, well, then even better,
I'll get to know a nice one for a change ;-)
Posted by: Tommaso Dorigo | May 11, 2005 at 01:54 PM