Four short years later, Professor of Physics Kannan Jagannathan has proven to be neither the only nor the last person to enjoy an entirely unique encounter with Sarang Gopalakrishnan.
Gopalakrishnan was born in India and attended school in Tanzania. When he tells of his decision to enroll at the college, his account is succinct. "I chose Amherst because of [the U.S. News rankings]," he said. "I wanted to go to a 'liberal arts' place because I was interested in literature, and my choices were Amherst, Wesleyan and Dartmouth. I had a cousin who was at Dartmouth then, so naturally I decided to go to Amherst."
Naturally.
The Dualist
That he came upon the college by way of those much-contested rankings should not suggest that Gopalakrishnan took his studies in any way lightly. While most here at Amherst are content to excel in one discipline, Sarang built a curious reputation as the darling of two entirely asymmetrical departments-physics and English.
An initiate student of physics myself, I first came to know Sarang thanks to his near-constant habitation of Merrill Science Building's second floor computer lab. He's something of a folk hero down there-an unmistakably skinny fellow, his speech punctuated by that aforementioned accent and widely regarded among students and faculty alike as the most formidable physics major on campus.
"Sarang took Physics 33 in the first semester of his freshman year," recalled William Loinaz, another physics professor and Gopalakrishnan's thesis advisor. "Normally first-year students don't take the course, but an unusually large number of strong first-year students had placed in. Faced with the probably the best class of students I had yet seen at Amherst, I ran a very tough, very sophisticated version of the course, and I used a textbook packed with deliciously difficult problems. The first-year students didn't really appreciate how good the rest of the class was and how tough the course was; they worked like monsters, assuming this was just the natural order of things. It was clear to me that this was going to be an exceptional crop of physics majors, and even in such a strong group Sarang distinguished himself."
Professor of English Howell Chickering spoke to Gopalakrishnan's reciprocal interest in literature with enthusiasm. "Sarang is probably the best-read student of literature that I have taught in 40 years at Amherst," he said. "In the five courses he has taken with me, I have been continually astonished by the range and depth of his reading. He also knows reams of poetry by heart. Always an 'A' student, he took two Chaucer courses and two Old English courses with me, and The Grammar of English with me and professor Michele Barale, where we gave him an A+. I may have given him another. It is hard to keep track of all his accomplishments."
In speaking to English and physics professors, one finds that those of one department were quick to point out Gopalakrishnan's accomplishments in the other. "It goes without saying that he is a brilliant writer of literary essays," declared Chickering. "But he is also a physicist who has written a thesis on quantum mechanics, and a prize-winning poet as well. He has a preternaturally quick mind and more intellectual interests than any two professors put together."
Loinaz was at first surprised to learn of Gopalakrishnan's manifold talents. "He's very modest," he said. "I had no idea he was such a highly-regarded poet until word filtered over from the English department via the faculty. Confirmation came when the English department dropped a heap of money on him to bird-watch in Scotland last summer."
That "heap of money" constituted a MacArthur-Leithauser Travel Grant awarded by the College's English department in light of Gopalakrishnan's achievement therein. "[Sarang] is a professional level bird-watcher," mused Chickering. "When the English department awarded him our MacArthur-Leithauser Travel Grant the summer of his junior year, he not only visited many literary shrines in England and Scotland, but also the Orkney Islands where he added to his 'life list' of bird species. I think he may have been a puffin in a previous incarnation."
Fall to the center
Gopalakrishnan's thesis in physics, "Self-adjointness and the renormalization of singular potentials," concerns the "fall to the center" problem of quantum mechanics. In his own words: "The idea is that some force fields are significantly attractive that a particle moving in them would collide with the center of the field in a finite time, moving infinitely fast. I studied the consequences of various schemes to resolve this problem." (Befitting Gopalakrishnan's dual interests, the paper opens with a poem, "Lines composed upon reading a thesis abstract by S. Gopalakrishnan," composed by classmate Jesse McCarthy.)
"[Sarang's] thesis research was innovative and sophisticated," said Loinaz. "And once he had steeped himself in his subject he regularly presented me with the kinds of insights I would hope for from an advanced graduate student. He has changed my expectations of what could be expected in an undergraduate thesis in that field, and I expect several publications will be spawned from his thesis work. And he still managed to get considerable time in at 3D Pong all the while."
From Russia with love
While his thesis concerns the study of physics, Sarang plans to switch gears this summer and return to his passion for literature. Sarang won one of 60 Thomas J. Watson Fellowships awarded yearly to promising college graduates. The Watson Fellowship program was founded in 1968 and grants students the freedom to study and travel abroad. In his proposal to the fellowship program, Sarang declared his intent to "explore cultures of remoteness in central and eastern Russia, and the links that bind these isolated but often substantial communities to one another and the outside world. My interest in these cultures is literary at heart, and the document I hope to produce is a half-poetic travel memoir."
Speaking on Gopalakrishnan's talent for literature, professor Loinaz noted that, "Perhaps not coincidentally, [Sarang] also has wonderful talents of persuasion. He has the ability to assert virtually anything with not just with a straight face, but with great authority. This may have worked against him, though. He convinced the Watson Fellowship committee that it was a good idea for him to study cultures of isolation in Siberia. This is despite the fact that he is the skinniest, least-insulated student in my memory, and despite the fact that he speaks no Russian. I told him it was the first Watson application I could remember for which the applicant should pray for rejection."
Ad infinitum
Upon his return, Sarang will assume graduate studies in physics at the University of Illinois, a major center for the study of condensed matter physics. When asked of his particular interest in continuing his work in physics, Sarang said that he was "Most interested in applying sophisticated mathematical techniques to the study of unusual phase transitions."
Though he is moving on from Amherst, Sarang will certainly have left his mark in the minds of students and professors here. "Sarang is possibly the most knowledgeable, consistently funny and cynically insightful person I know," said classmate Daisuke O. "Whenever I have a question about proper English usage, etymology, European history, math, physics, poetry or literature, my immediate reaction is to ask Sarang directly and hope he isn't screwing with me."
Where Gopalakrishnan will be five years from now is anyone's guess. "My plans after graduate school are entirely up in the air," he said. "I might go into academics, or teach school and write my novel 'Pink Sock,' assuming I don't get it written earlier."
Looking back on his college experience, Gopalakrishnan said, "Basically I know a lot more about a lot more than I did four years ago. I guess I'm also more used to being alone and doing my own thing-you know, the usual reasons that college is a good idea. Amherst in particular was good for me because it was small enough that there weren't too many options-at bigger schools there'd always be enough interesting electives in one's major that one might never take anything outside it."
"I think now even he may agree that he did not know everything coming in," laughed Jagannathan. "He and I agree that now he knows everything again ... until some pesky graduate school professor inclines otherwise. I wish Sarang the best."