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Somebody posted the following:

I have heard (from two sources) that at the University of Chicago a senior faculty member was temporarily banned from teaching undergraduate courses. The reason is that during a first semester undergraduate linear algebra course he did everything over the Quaternions.

This one isn't so much academically scary, but my advisor told me that it was always interesting riding to conferences with the above professor because he would refuse to defrost the windshield so that he could draw diagrams on it and do math while he was driving.

Now I have never taught linear algebra at Chicago, since as somebody else pointed out we have no undergraduate linear algebra courses, but in the 1960's and 1970's I did in fact drive to and from seminars and conferences at Northwestern seminars without defrosting the windshield in order to have a convenient blackboard. I recall that it worked very well.

Peter May
show/hide this revision's text 2 added 2 characters in body

Somebody posted the following:

I have heard (from two sources) that at the University of Chicago a senior faculty member was temporarily banned from teaching undergraduate courses. The reason is that during a first semester undergraduate linear algebra course he did everything over the Quaternions.

This one isn't so much academically scary, but my advisor told me that it was always interesting riding to conferences with the above professor because he would refuse to defrost the windshield so that he could draw diagrams on it and do math while he was driving.

Now I have never taught linear algebra at Chicago, since as somebody else pointed out we have no undergraduate linear algebra courses, but in the 1960's and 1970's I did in fact drive to and from seminars and conferences at Northwestern seminars without defrosting the windshield in order to have a convenient blackboard. I recall that it worked very well.

Peter May
show/hide this revision's text 1 [made Community Wiki]

Somebody posted the following:

I have heard (from two sources) that at the University of Chicago a senior faculty member was temporarily banned from teaching undergraduate courses. The reason is that during a first semester undergraduate linear algebra course he did everything over the Quaternions.

This one isn't so much academically scary, but my advisor told me that it was always interesting riding to conferences with the above professor because he would refuse to defrost the windshield so that he could draw diagrams on it and do math while he was driving.

Now I have never taught linear algebra at Chicago, since as somebody else pointed out we have no undergraduate linear algebra courses, but in the 1960's and 1970's I did in fact drive to and from seminars and conferences at Northwestern seminars without defrosting the windshield in order to have a convenient blackboard. I recall that it worked very well.

Peter May