At the math library

In the Stanford Math library copier room, working through the intricacies buying a copy card (ie, depositing cash into its account and getting a copier to accept it), I met Lisl Gaal, a retired mathematician from the University of Minnesota. "Polya I knew, but he didn't like me," he said. "Szego liked me much better." He had what sounded to me might be an Hungarian accent. (We were standing close to a Polya display and a bust of Szego). "How does this work?" he said.

"The only tricky thing about this card stuff is remembering to press the 'Receipt' button," I said. "First, you must buy the card, that's $1. But the card comes with no money. So you have to deposit money to be on the card. That's simple, but you have to press 'Receipt'. If you don't, the transaction hasn't closed as far as the card money loading machine is concerned. When you go to a copier, the card will act as if its invalid."

I eyed the book he had, a Fedora Linux manual. "What's that you've got there—you want to copy that?"

"There's a good exposition of the Grub loader in it," he said. He opened the book to show me what looked like a Linux config file.

"Grub?" I asked.

"Right, G-R-U-B," he said.

"That's a bootloader, or something?" I said. (I was looking at the code in the book).

"Yes. It's very good," he said.

"I'm impressed that you are interested in such subjects!" I said.