I confess I binged this instead of googled it: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD841.html

I misremembered it as something Gauss said, not Euclid. Feeble human brains still need to be reminded of things learned over 2000 years ago. At least mine does. There is nothing I can add to Dijkstra’s observations other than an anecdote.

Last Thursday I had dinner at the Columbia Faculty House. My friend is taking a break from a course he has been teaching and I offered to fill in. And found out there is a 1000ft elevation change between Morningside Ave and Morningside Dr. Next time I’ll take the 1 train instead of the B line unless I want the exercise.

One of the professors at dinner paid me the nicest complement, after drawing it out a bit. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi, I’m Keith Lewis.
Him: <Russian accent>I have heard your name before.</Russian accent>
Me: <Getting Nervous>Oh?</Still Nervous>
Him: <RA>People have told me things about you.</RA>
Me: <CMA?>I’m sure some of those things are probably true.</CMA?>
Him: They have said they have taken your course before and found it very difficult.
Me: <Keeping my mouth shut/>
Him: Then they realized they could do the homework. They also told me they found what you taught them was useful for their job.

Bingo! It is the same thing every semester. Students complain the material is too hard. I go over the previous homework at the beginning of each class and ask them what else they needed to be successful doing it. The answer is always the same: Nothing.

There are some things that can be learned by having your hand held and walking you down the garden path. (How do I get the Visual Studio debugger to start Excel and load an add-in?) But you can only learn the important and truly useful things by spending some time in the limbo of uncomfortable uncertainty. If your brain isn’t hurting, you aren’t learning anything new.

A dead, but not forgotten, man just taught me a new vocabulary word: pleonastic. I need to try and endeavor to avoid and eschew pleonasm.