mathNEWS Advice:
DON'T PANIC

This is the story of a publication, a publication called mathNEWS. Not only is it a wholly remarkable publication, it is also a highly successful one — more popular than most lectures on Friday mornings, better selling than course notes for STAT 231, and more controversial than Skip's trilogy of research papers 'Where Davis Centre Engineers Went Wrong', 'Some More of Engineering's Greatest Mistakes' and 'Who Are These Engineer People Anyway?'

The Imprint defines mathNEWS as 'rough-edged, put together by people unconcerned with layout'.

Curiously enough, an edition of mathNEWS that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined Imprint as 'just another campus publication', with a footnote to the effect that editors would welcome inquiries about any of the vast number of campus publications that started publishing after mathNEWS was established back in 1973. In fact, mathNEWS has been publishing and parodying many times over many years and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of mathies and professors. Your introduction begins like this:

'University,' it says, 'is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it was a long way down the hallway to the high school cafeteria, but that's just peanuts to University. Listen ...' and so on.

(After a while the style settles down a bit and it begins to tell you things you really need to know, like the location of the Math Tutorial Centre on the fourth floor, the fact that you can reach the DWE building without ever going outside, and how to find any room on the sixth floor of MC by using the map which can normally only be read by someone with the mental capacity for calculating probability forcasts based on improbability data: something which even most of the statisticians who have offices up there are still pretty hazy about.)

mathNEWS also has a few things to say on the subject of pink ties.

'A pink tie,' it says, 'is about the most massively useful thing a Waterloo mathie can have. Partly because it has great practical value — you can wave it in the air to help get you noticed in a crowd, flick it at people who invade your personal space, use it to hold open doors as is done in MathSOC, tie it over your eyes in the hopes that if you can't see the professor he won't call on you for the answer, tease the squirrels with it, employ it as a gag or rope to restrain someone who may be particularly annoying you, and of course wear it to public functions if it still seems to be clean enough.

'More importantly, a pink tie has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a potential employer discovers that a Waterloo graduate has a pink tie with them, they will automatically assume that s/he is also in possession of a mechanical pencil, ballpoint pen, calculator, palm pilot, library of textbooks, laptop, web access, caffeine supplement, copy of mathNEWS etc, etc. Furthermore, said individual will then happily hire the mathie, providing them with any of these or a dozen other items that the mathie might accidentally have 'lost'. What the employer will think is that any person who can survive three, four, five or more years in the Math Faculty at the University of Waterloo, obtain their degree, and yet still know where their pink tie is, is clearly somebody to be reckoned with.'

mathNEWS sells rather better than the Co-op Work Report Guidelines. In these enlightened days of course, no one believes a word of it.

Seriously though... what's this mathNEWS?

Well, mathNEWS is the University of Waterloo Faculty of Mathematics Student Newspaper. (Or publication, or magazine, or newsletter... whatever the editor feels like calling it.) We publish about every two weeks, usually on Friday, and contain articles written by people just like yourself! Being student funded (some of your MathSoc fee goes here) and a volunteer publication, we are always in search of people who can write. Or draw. Or proofread. Anything, really. We'll even bribe you to come out to production nights every other Monday with free food. You don't need any experience, just interest. Plus you'll get to see your name in print!

The content of mathNEWS itself will vary from term to term depending on who's editting. However, there is usually a mathNEWSquiz, a gridWORD and profQUOTES. The former two offer prizes for correct solutions. The profQUOTES are a collection of actual quotes as uttered by actual professors during actual lectures. Look for those elsewhere in the issue. In terms of other articles... well, have an opinion you want to express? A weird proof you thought up? Something that you think is funnier than what we're printing? A solution to one of our puzzles? Then if you're too shy to come out of an actual production night, submit such things to us by emailing mathnews@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca or by dropping your submission into the BLACK BOX on the 3^rd floor (across from the lounge).

In the past, mathNEWS has on occasion gone nuts and put out a parody issue like the recent Daglobenpost, the not-so-recent Irrational Toast and Toronto Numb, and the out-of-spare-copies Impotent. It doesn't happen often because those things take a lot of time and effort, but if you're nice to the editors they may give you a complimentary copy. Oh, and yes, mathNEWS really has been around since 1973. (Issue 500 was another issue that took time and effort.) Feel free to drop by our office (MC 3041) when it's open to look at our mathNEWS Gallery/Shelf o' Memorabelia, which includes among other items: a piece of Red Room panelling, an EMS Library Sign dating back to before the books were moved off the fourth floor of MC into the "new" DC building, and a silk screen from Math Frosh Week 1979. You can even just come by to say 'hi' or drop off an article in person.

Oh yes, and we have a web page, http://www.mathnews.uwaterloo.ca/ You can find past issues there and maybe learn more about us. So enough rambling... the mathNEWS DISorganizational meeting will be held during the first week of classes in September. That's when we see about getting our act together for another term. Hope to see you there too!

Greg Taylor
Editor