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I was very fortunate to have worked on Arvind's Monsoon project as a contractor for Motorola. He was the very model of what a professor ought to be: an active and outgoing researcher, an natural educator, a good organizer, and a lively, witty, and gracious man in public. What a loss. The last time I saw him, at a dinner in Champaign IL around 2005, he told this joke, apropos of MIT's reputation for arrogance: Someone called a faculty meeting at MIT and said, guys, we have a problem. People say that we're arrogant. We need to come up with some ideas for being less arrogant. Who has an idea? One of the faculty members stood up and said, I know! I'll teach a course on humility! The meeting organizer said that's a great idea! A course on humility is exactly what we need! And the meeting was adjourned. At the end of the semester, a follow-up faculty meeting was called. The organizer asked, so, what about our course on humility? Let's have a report about it. The faculty member who taught the course stood up, and said: We have the best g*d-damned course on humility! --- RIP Arvind. |