“All I Really Need to Know I Learned
from Max Mintz.”
BY MICHAEL J. SCHWAGER
Walk the Penn Engineering campus, and you may spot a
student or two wearing a T-shirt that bears those words
and a picture of a longtime professor who looks a bit like
the actor Robert Duval.
Mintz, a Professor of Computer and nformation Science,
has been at Penn Engineering since 1974. Both incisive
and funny, he effuses when speaking about his work at Penn.
The words flow freely, and the wit that emerges gives a
glimpse at why he’s a beloved teacher and an icon
among students.
“I love teaching here,” Mintz says. “It’s
such a joy.”
“He’s a fascinating character,” says
Ben Slusky, CSE ’01. “Two of his courses—CSE
260 and 261, Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science
I and II—are a significant milestone for undergraduate
CSE students. They’re probably the two biggest ‘widow
maker’ classes in the curriculum.”
Slusky is a member of the Science and Technology Wing,
a group of more than 200 undergraduates, graduate students,
professors, and alumni who have a strong interest in science
and technology and who conduct a variety of research projects.
The STWing also hosts dinner discussions with faculty and
staff members and holds several social events during the
year.
“The STWing is not just engineering students,” Mintz
says. “They come from all over the map—natural
sciences, engineering, and none of the above who are interested
in the topic. This is a selfselecting group of students.
It’s quite a lovely thing. They’re deeply interested
in their studies, but they’re not so inwardly focused
that they don’t have a view of the wider world. They’re
interested in how things have changed in technology— and
education—in the past 40 years. It gives me great
pleasure to interact with them.
“I’ve been invited once a year or so to sing
for my supper. Some people who come haven’t heard
me before, so I can tell my old war stories. If the people
have heard me before, I have to come up with new war stories.”
Another of Mintz’s delights is University Scholars,
a research-based honors program run by the Center for Undergraduate
Research and Fellowships. “The program helps make
life wonderful for me,” he says. “It supports
students in doing research at the beginning of their undergraduate
careers, instead of waiting till the very end to find out
what research is all about.”
The program draws students from many walks of the University.
Ariane Schwartz, C ’05, GS ’05, a Classics
major, met Mintz in the spring of her freshman year, when
he was one of three faculty members who interviewed her
for the program. “Soon after that interview,” she
says, “I began to speak with him informally about
my research and the UScholars program.”
At the beginning of her sophomore year, Schwartz ran into
Mintz on Walnut Street. “I remember vividly that
we spoke for a good 20 minutes about an intensive German
course that I took at Harvard over that previous summer,
and about my research in the Harvard libraries. His eyes
lit up as soon as he saw me, and he was extremely excited
by and interested in the experiences I related. Not only
his dedication to undergraduate research struck me, but
also his interest in the details of my work, which lie
very much outside his professional field.”
Schwartz was touched “that a distinguished Penn
professor in a department (and school) far from my own
can deeply care about what makes me tick in the world of
humanities research. He serves as a perfect example of
a Penn professor who deeply cares about all students, regardless
of their field of study. Who would readily guess that a
professor of computer science eagerly stops a Classics
major on the street to discuss her current progress in
philological research?”
Whether you chance to meet Mintz on the street or have
a scheduled appointment, a conversation with him can be
a mini-education. The best way to learn something, he says, “is
to teach it to somebody else. How is it organized?
How did people learn it? We should show our students what
doesn’t work. If you want to understand what’s
in a particular paper, don’t look at the paper—look
at the wastebasket.”
Kevin Gimpel, CSE ’04, took Mintz’s Mathematical
Foundations courses as a sophomore and for the past year
has been one of his teaching assistants. “Professor
Mintz,” Gimpel says, “attempts every possible
means of making his students learn and understand the course
material, most admirably when this involves extreme amounts
of energy and enthusiasm during classes.
“He’ll find anything to joke about to keep
his students’ attention, and, as I know from our
weekly staff meetings, he is constantly concerned about
maintaining an appropriate pace to ensure that his students
are keeping up with the material. He makes his courses
challenging, but with the sole purpose of improving his
students’ thinking ability.”
At first, Gimpel says, the class was a struggle. “I
got zeroes (out of a hundred) on the first few quizzes.
The course seemed insurmountable. But then, after more
time working on homework problems and studying lecture
notes, I finally ‘got’ what he was trying to
get us to do—think!
“His course was one of the most challenging and
also most beneficial that I’ve taken at Penn, mainly
because it was the first time in my academic career that
I hit a brick wall and felt like I could do nothing to
achieve success in the course. Hard work, persistence,
and Dr. Mintz’s lectures were all that I needed not
only to succeed in the class but to go on and become a
TA as well.”
“Professor Mintz has a unique though often underappreciated
teaching style,” says Slusky. “He makes his
classroom slides available to the students in advance but
departs from them often in the lectures. Sometimes he’ll
spend an entire lecture expounding on a point that got
one paragraph in the slides. Other times he’ll spend
an entire lecture relating a seemingly random anecdote,
on the grounds that ‘This is part of your culture!’
Mintz was the undergraduate chair of Computer Science
and Engineering but stepped down about a year ago. “It
was time,” he says. “I was in the fifth year
of a three-year term. You need to give other people a chance.”
The students who’ve learned from Mintz pursue many
activities after their years at Penn. “Many don’t
go on and do pure technical work,” Mintz says. “True,
some go into computer science systems or theory. Others
go into the business world and do remarkable things. Some
found their own companies. We’ve had some impressive
intellects and personalities.”
Slusky, who now works as a UNIX systems administrator
for the Vanguard Group, recalls that he and Elan Ruskin,
also EAS ’01 and a fellow member of the STWing, got
the idea for the T-shirts in the 1998–99 academic
year. Four years later, he says, he finally got back to
it.
“Ben came to see me in late January or early February
of this year,” Mintz says. “He asked permission
for the STWing folks to create a T-shirt. It became evident
that it would have my face on it. For a few moments, my
response was silence—and I’m not generally
known as a guy who’s at a loss for words.” Mintz
wanted to help the STWing raise money, and after hemming
and hawing, he gave his okay. His one caveat: “Don’t
sell these things on eBay.”
A month after Slusky made the request, Mintz saw no signs
of the T-shirts and began to think that he’d “dodged
a bullet.” But, he says, “In April, I saw Ben
trundling a bundle of shirts. I saw my picture on the front
and thought, ‘Oh my.’”
“Dr. Mintz approved the shirts on the condition
that we sell them only to those who already knew him well,” Slusky
says. “He’s actually quite shy and probably
finds the attention a bit unnerving, but he’d been
an icon for a long while before people started wearing
his face.”
“I don’t consider myself worthy of having
my face on a T-shirt,” Mintz says. “I’m
a low-profile guy who likes to teach and do research. They
could have put any of about 15 professors on a shirt. Why
me? Maybe because I don’t take myself too seriously.”
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