[parl_match]

> I learned on Monday that he had spent the entire weekend trying and failing to prove it. I, on the other hand, had put all my energy into finding a counterexample and had one within an hour.

He spent an entire weekend before having the wisdom to pause, and let someone else contribute their time to finding a counter.

[Dove]

This was back when the internet was mostly chain emails and personal web pages, being unreachable once you went home for the weekend was perfectly normal and expected, and automatically thinking the worst of people was not a common form of public performance art. ;)

[jibal]

> having the wisdom

Ahem.

> On one particular Friday afternoon, he stated a conjecture that he hoped was true, and invited us to try to help him prove or disprove it.

It was a parallel effort ... we don't know how many people were working on it that weekend. And since the professor wanted it to be true and presumably believed that it was true, why the heck should he wait for students of unknown number and ability to find a counterexample that he didn't think existed?

[lotharbot]

[Background: I am Dove's husband, and remember the incident described]

What actually happened was the professor posed the question in class as an open research question, which he regularly did, with no particular expectation that any students would work on it or make meaningful progress. My wife happened to sit down in her office and come up with a counterexample, which she wrote on paper and left in the professor's physical mailbox on campus fairly late in the evening. He had almost certainly already left campus for the weekend by that time. This wasn't a case of some sort of arrogance or lack of wisdom, just a case of non-instantaneous asynchronous analog communication methods.

This particular professor was extremely good at letting others contribute. As soon as the contribution actually reached him, he assessed it and used it.