Okay, you guys keep bugging me to apply for this position, but I must warn you: I like to break the rules.

I just finished perusing the latest article on ias.edu about Professor Williams and her “Unanticipated Journey through the Physical world” and while I skimmed her history, which wasn’t very different from many other mathematicians – despite her gender and all that – what I found more interesting was what she was writing on the whiteboard.

“Alright, I know I shouldn’t minimize what she’s doing, but it’s just permutation groups of finite order. That’s like introductory abstract algebra. Wait, she’s probably using a Group Scheme or something…” I thought, because if there’s one thing I know about Algebraic Geometers, is that they’re really good at making simple concepts confusing. But then I saw the Grassmannian.

Anyway, that’s how anyone establishes or learns new information, they compare it to a database of stored information and make as many similarities as they can and then interpolate and extrapolate until new information is synthesized. Just staring at that picture, that’s all I had to go off of, but knowing how important symmetry groups are to mathematical biology and mathematical physics, I hold my breath for the later significance at one of her seminars.

Right. My application.

Okay, I like to break laws.

Not only grammatical laws.

Not simply criminal laws.

I’m talking about thermodynamic laws, particularly the second. Something, something, entropy, something, something Maxwell’s Demon, something something something something, something.

The reason why I don’t study mathematics professionally anymore, is because no one was paying me to do it, and I needed money. Sure, I did spend two years living in the Mathematics department at University of Washington, but there was one more rule I needed to break: my family’s poverty.

So, I moved to Princeton and opened my own medical practice at 112 Mercer Street and thus began my independent research.

In the way that Professor Williams loves patterns, I love to study when patterns fail. Statisticians call this deviancy, the judicial system calls it larceny, mathematicians call it singularity, physicists call it anomaly, neurologists call it encephalopathy, psychiatrists call it psychopathy and I call it autoimmunity.

My history of larceny is more of mental arsony, but you have to wait for the dissertation to see what I mean. Yeah, I don’t have a PhD… yet. I’ve applied to the Princeton Physics department although I would rather do a dual PhD in Physics and Mathematics, and then be a professor in the Physics and Mathematics department. (See what I mean about rule breaking?) I find that since Fine and Jadwin Hall are literally connected, it isn’t that big of a leap to request this.

I haven’t written much I know, and I don’t have time to doctor up a CV beyond what I did while I studying academically, because I don’t want to put anymore time into this unless I receive compensation. I do value and respect this position, and I’m more than qualified to work at this institution for many reasons my polymath status notwithstanding, but I also have a lot of work to do, and I dropped out of school previously because I am an interdisciplinary researcher, and mathematics can be such a jealous subject.

So would you mind breaking the rules for me?