I just saw A Beautiful Mind for the second time, and the part about honoring an academician by placing your pen in front of him wasn’t fully explained.
Someone who has achieved high distinction in his field is sitting at a table in the faculty dining hall at Princeton, and one by one, other faculty approach with great deference and line up their pens in front of him. They say things like “It’s a privilege, Professor.”
How did this custom begin?
Is it totally spontaneous, as the movie seemd to suggest, or is it ritualized?
Is it done only at Princeton, or is it done anywhere else?
I wondered if it were some sort of survival from medieval times, as it reminded me of nothing so much as a vassal or knight in armor offering his sword to the monarch as a pledge of fealty. But, as we all know, “the pen is mightier than the sword,” ha ha…
Like most of that film, the pen ritual is completely made up. I work as a mathematician, and I’ve never heard of any such ritual. I asked someone whose Ph.D. is from Princeton, and he’s never heard of it either. The ritual is so bizarrely different from the way that academia actually works that it seems to me unlikely that it exists anywhere. It’s not mentioned in the book A Beautiful Mind, in any case.
In general, you should be very suspicious about any of the “facts” about Nash given in the movie. What little of his real life that’s shown in the movie has been greatly distorted.
Kidding aside, are there any Princetonians among the Dopers who can corroborate Wendell Wagner’s denial of authenticity? Maybe it’s done in some other universities? and Ron Howard just stuck it in his movie as a cinematic shorthand for the meaning he aimed to get across? Or maybe it really has no basis in reality at all?
IIRC, one of the other characters (Judd Hirsch’s?) explained it early on in the film when the main character was a newbie at Princeton. And it didn’t make too much sense then, either.