That’ll learn me

I wanted to see how a book I’d checked out from our library treated a certain topic, hoping that it might have a theorem all ready for me to use. Unfortunately I didn’t remember the authors nor exactly what it was called, but I did remember what it looked like. So I went to the library and tried to find it with no luck. As a fallback, I asked Paul.

Paul Lukasiewicz is our librarian, and has been around forever. People I know who were students here in the early ’80s thought of him as omniscient already. You can give him a title and author of any book in the library and he can tell you what color it is off the top of his head.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work in reverse, so I was driven back to the online directory of the library system here to search through hundreds of books on the topic to find the one I remembered. They really need to make those things searchable on appearance.