As a series of engaging essays, this book is laced with personal anecdotes about what it means to be a professor, a science professor in particular, and how the American university has changed now that the era of exponential growth in federal funding is over. Written in an informal, conversational style, its central purpose is to try to stimulate discussion and challenge the status quo. "Universities are at significant crosroads," the author writes, "they can keep trying to grow and push the post-World War II model of a university despite the absence of growing federal funds. Or they can try to redefine themselves in a way that takes into account the changes in the national economic and intellectual landscape over the last decade or two."

A comic, bittersweet tale of family evocative of "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" and "Everything Is Illuminated"
Alexander "Sasha" Karnokovitch and his family would like to mourn the passing of his mother, Rachela, with modesty and dignity. But Rachela, a famous Polish emigre mathematician and professor at the University of Wisconsin, is rumored to have solved the million-dollar, Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem. Rumor also has it that she spitefully took the solution to her grave. To Sasha's chagrin, a ragtag group of socially challenged mathematicians arrives in Madison and crashes the shiva, vowing to do whatever it takes to find the solution--even if it means prying up the floorboards for Rachela's notes.
Written by a trained geophysicist, this hilarious and multi-layered debut novel brims with colorful characters and brilliantly captures humanity's drive not just to survive, but to solve the impossible.