Was FORTRAN buggy 4353

snip

Yup. (I'm not sure I'd have recognized him from the picture, but I remember the name, just wasn't entirely sure about the spelling.)

Nope. I'm not sure that back then I would have been aware that a research-oriented faculty person typically had a retinue (?) of postdocs and graduate students.

The way I remember it, I did well in the course from the standpoint of completing buttigned work and pbutting exams, but even at the time I think I was dimly aware that there was something I wasn't getting. If asked, I would probably have said that the course seemed to be an interesting experiment in teaching graduate-level physical chemistry to beginners, but that the experiment wasn't a huge success. Maybe it worked better for others. I think I signed up for it because for some reason (perhaps a curricular requirement) I wanted to take a chemistry course, and this one didn't have an buttociated lab in the usual sense, which was a big plus for someone whose experiences in high-school chemistry lab were .... pretty uniformly not good.

I do remember that Professor Matsen was fond of telling the occasional personal anecdote in clbutt, and one of them has even stuck with me, as part of my collection of "stories about weird professors" that's one of the more entertaining results of my years at UT. But alas, most of the actual course material is gone from my conscious memory .... Maybe if I reviewed my notes from the clbutt, if I kept them? (I might have.)

It sounds like you had a pretty different experience. Maybe it's that -- did you say upthread that you were a chemistry major? I was doing math, and for me courses in the sciences were interesting but not a lot more so than other non-math subjects.

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.