I'm at a talk at the KMS meeting. It is an extremal graph theory talk about an extension of the Simonovitz-Trotter Theorem.

The speaker, Ha, is getting into the counter example that gives the lower bound for the result. In lieu of proof or reference, he says offhandedly, "Even a grad student could show this."

We do this in talks. There is no time for all the details, so we give people an idea of the difficulty of the details that we are skipping.

The thing is, I feel that Ha is looking my way when he says it. There is no way I can be mistaken for a grad student, so if he has looked at me, it can only be a challenge– a sort of: "But I know you can't solve it."

This gets my ire up. I don't even know this guy. Why is he taking shots at me in his talk? But in truth, I don't think I could show it, I don't even know where to start.

A few minutes later he prefaces a statement with "Any undergrad would know that..."

He is not looking my way. I used to know this thing that any undergrad would know, but I am not an undergrad anymore, and more important things have pushed it from my mind.

Yet later, he refers to a problem as a 'high-school problem', and then that another verification uses just 'elementary school math'. For both of these comments, I feel he is looking at me.

I look around at the audience for acknowledgement of this fact, but nobody seems aware of it.

It must just be in my head.

"Thanks for listening to my talk," he finishes, "I realize that none of this is very hard, even Mark's dumb brother could have done most of it, the main innovation point is the application of spectral techniques to the problem."

Richard isn't dumb, he just has thick fingers.