A Sustaining Tradition
Many math departments have a custom of gathering to eat together on a regular basis. In some cases it’s a brown-bag lunch in the departmental lounge. If there’s a faculty club, there’s probably a group that meets there. When I was a graduate student at Cambridge, lunches were not a matter of tradition, but morning coffee and afternoon tea breaks very much were.
Shortly after I became a postdoc at Dalhousie, one of the professors told me « You ought to come to Tuesday Lunch. » The rules were explained to me. The group met at 11:37 exactly in the downstairs hall of the Chase building, then walked eastward along Coburg Road and Spring Garden Road to the intersection with South Park Street. There, on the street corner, at noon, a complicated and ritualized negotiation would take place, under rules laid down by Heydar Radjavi, to decide the restaurant where we’d eat that week.
Anybody could make a suggestion; once a suggestion was made, anybody could veto it. This might seem like a recipe for deadlock, but each participant was restricted to one veto per week, so if N were in attendance, the algorithm terminated in at most N+1 rounds. Lest the veto power be weakened too much by the single-veto rule, a venue that had been vetoed could not be put forward again that week. Finally, in the spirit of mathematical elegance, these rules did not distinguish between the proposer and othes present: if somebody wanted to withdraw a suggestion they could do so, provided that they still had a veto and were willing to use it. (My recollection is that this last rule was sometimes circumvented: if a proposer had a change of heart, and no veto left to put it into practice, somebody else would help out.)
So I went along. Regular attenders included Heydar, Peter Fillmore, Bob Paré, S. Swaminathan, Karl Dilcher, Keith Johnson, Chelluri Sastri and, even after I took a position at SMU, myself; but many others within and outside the department attended sporadically. Over the years, we visited most of the downtown Halifax restaurants. There were weeks when only a few attended, and weeks when out planning meeting came close to blocking the sidewalk.
Then came a period when my teaching and departmental responsibilities made it difficult to attend. Heydar moved to a post-retirement position in Waterloo. After a while, I heard that a few people were still meeting, but (due to some participants’ health) the 11:37 meeting and the walk from Dalhousie to South Park Street were no longer taking place, so it was no longer possible to turn up on the spur of the moment. And that was it, until last month I met one of the long-time lunchers at a concert.
« Why don’t you come to Tuesday Lunch? » he asked.
« How? » I responded. And so I got myself onto the mailing list that now directs participants to the restaurant of the week. Numbers are smaller, routines simplified, but it’s still in many ways what it was forty years ago.
It’s good to be back.
