There was this intense Indian professor who had this air about him that was sort of condescending but more just dismissive. Ie, there was some pretty intense sttt he would routinely characterize as trivial or obvious.
The thing was, you were never sure whether he was trolling you or not. At a party or some event, supposedly somebody asked him what his research interest was. They were probably expecting to hear something like knot theory or PDE or whatever, but his research interest was "Mathematics", which I guess makes sense because that's what he worked on.
He liked teaching undergraduates but the department only let him do it once every four years or so, as the memories faded from the last time he did it. The year he taught the honors analysis class, it started in the fall with something like 32 students (and all of them by invitation at that) and ended with 6. And so the six survivors printed up T-shirts for having completed the course and wore them to the spring semester final. He's handing out the final and sees the shirts and says something like, "Don't be too confident about that."
Ok, there's really only a couple of stories I know of Eckhart hall but I should mention them before this gets too stale.
Most or every weekday, the faculty and other interested parties meet for tea at about 4PM in the tea room across from the library.
I was taking abstract algebra at the time and the professor was a fairly recent Phd. And, most or all UC undergraduates learn some familiarity with the categorical imperatives of Immanuel Kant. Somehow, the subject came up whether or not the idea of category theory (or at least the name) is in some way derivative of the categorical imperative.
The inventor of category theory was Saunders Mac Lane who was on the faculty. At tea one day our teacher asked Mr Mac Lane if there was any relationship between category theory and the categorical imperative.
Oddly enough the answer was yes, in an oblique way. This story would be quite a bit better if I remembered some idea of what the relationship was but unfortunately I don't. In any case it seemed pretty cool at the time.