Professor Lee

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.