Professor Lee comes to my office. He is new in the department. Fresh like a baby. He is applied, but his math is strong, and we have high hopes for him.
"What it the strangest place you've done math?" he asks.
"Strangest?" I ask, unsure where this is going. "Is Korea strange?"
He doesn't give anything up, so I continue.
"I post-docced in Prague, I guess, and have been to several conferences around Europe and Asia– Chendgu, in China, I guess."
"That doesn't seems so strange." he says.
"No," I say, "How about Tennessee?"
"Seems quotidian." he dismisses my suggestion with a unexpected mix of erudition and disdain.
"Where is the strangest place you have done math?" I counter.
"Up your ass!" he yells and runs off laughing.
The whole exchange is unexpected, and irking. I close the door to my office and wash my hands in my sink. I go back to my computer, and absently scratch an itch on my ankle.
Later, I get an itch on my bum. Scratching it, I find a pencil in my bum, and then some papers with rough workings on them. They are dirty, but I can make out some integrals, I think, and some limits.
This Lee is perhaps more than we bargained for.