p.s.

this amused me

if you're not familiar with academic journals... the general system is (1) people write papers about new things they've done and submit them (2) the journal sends the paper to another mathematician who is from loosely the same area of math and has that person edit (i.e. referee) the paper, and write up a report of suggestions or corrections (3) the writers recieve the report and make the corrections to have the article finally published... unless the referee strongly recommends that the paper is trash and shouldn't be published (i've never seen that happen first hand, but i know it does).

back in march, one of dr. z.'s friends wrote a paper that dr. z. was assigned to referee, only he gave it to me to ref instead... i've never done that before... anyhow i wrote up my report and send it to dr. z. on monday, and he sent it on to the journal ref with:

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Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 16:06:28 -0400 (EDT)
Dear (name of editor),

I delegated the refereeing of the (insert authors) paper to my brilliant and dedicated student Lara P------. She did a much beter job than I would have done.
You can download the report from:
(insert 2 links)
Best wishes

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later, i get the following reply:

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Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 14:32:06 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re:

Dear Lara,
thanks for your expert opinion!
(name of editor, who is well known in this area of math, who i own several books by :-P)

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mostly this was my advisor giving me work he didn't want to get around to, and that was profitable for me to do (it's a paper that's useful for me to have read for my own research, but i was amused... dr. z. is very good at advertising his students' work and very quick to praise us (which is fantastic!)... i just didn't expect a "thanks for your expert opinion" from someone whose work i admire.

really, me writing a half page .pdf isn't a big deal at all, i just love the way dr. z. phrases things and spreads names around :-)

now, really, on with my day :-P