On Boston.com’s Health section, a picture showed an elderly man with an eye patch, and the teaser said Paul Sally is the 74-year-old “Professor Pirate.” Woah. That’s prime Human Interest content, and I’m human, so of course I clicked on the link to read the article.
The article is a bizarre but moving portrait that mashes the professional accomplishments of a University of Chicago math professor with his tragic physical deformities resulting from diabetes complications, including the loss of his left eye 25 years ago. One day he’s ignoring doctors advice to lower the height of his two prosthetic legs from the unwieldy stature of 6 foot 3 inches…the next day he’s lecturing at MIT about supercuspidal representations of p-adic groups.
Disappointingly, past the teaser, nowhere is the moniker “Professor Pirate” used, although the line “a laugh large enough to make his eye patch dance” more than made up for this omission.
