A 'Brown' Professor

At an educational fair not too long ago, I met and talked with a French professor (with a heavy accent) who seemed very eager to offer me tutoring sessions in mathematics. We had a really long discussion that involved the professor's history, and how he was King of Mathematics in France. (Now, this is weird...I've met two self-proclaimed Kings of Mathematics of the USA, both graduates of Harvard, and now I know one King of Mathematics of France, so am I an incredibly lucky person or what? :) Hmm...)

The professor was very nice; I had barely spoken to him for five minutes when he offered to share his 'secrets to success' with me. I was all ears for any advice, because he had just told me how he had, as a student, always managed to maintain a vast margin (something like 30%!) of marks ahead of all his other classmates in exams. Unfortunately, however, I got the standard crap: 1. Do Mathematics for 12 hours a day, 2. Do Mathematics and nothing else, 3. Buy lots and lots of Mathematics books...I stopped listening when he suggested 4. One should skip meals in order to study mathematics. Now, it is possible to forget meals when one is doing mathematics, but to plan a skipped meal, I believe, is one of the stupidest things one could ever do! He went on babbling for another 15 minutes. I got really tired of the conversation, but the little cues I sent to inform him of this didn't work at all...OH, THE AGONY!

Somehow, after 30 minutes of listening to the worst diatribe ever, I managed to tell him that I HAD to visit the Physics booth next door. Before I parted ways with the Professor, we (custamarily, otherwise I wouldn't have cared) exchanged contact details. The Prof. managed to squeeze in a little mathematics problem onto the slip of paper he gave me (find the integral of ln(x)/x dx), which quite frankly, I found to be a real insult to my intellect, but perhaps he had good intentions and had mistaken me for being much younger than I really am. When I got home later that evening, I e-mailed him the answer, and expected our short 'friendship' to end at that.

A few days later, I received a reply from him, of which I found to be horribly spooky, because the manner in which it was written was the very epitome of salaciousness. Among other things, he asked to meet in person again, to give him my phone number, and he even hinted at an invitation out to dinner! It was at this point that I started to think that this guy might be a real fraud. I finally decided to call on the power of Google, and did a background check on the guy using the name he had given me.

Now, if this guy is a real fraudster, then he is a really stupid crook because the first few results were from a French Yahoo! Message Board for flirting. Now, I don't read French, but I have great faith in the efficacy of Babelfish, one of the most widely used tools for translating text on the internet. Here is one of the translated posts made under his name:

"Dear Dina; I am brown, 1.75 m, likes the voyage and the sport. Write to me chery, I wait you...I would like to entrust a thing to you it is that I am very sexist and I like to make unbounded love"

During our conversation, the Professor told me that he had authored many books, one of which was over 1000 pages long. However, nothing I found on the internet suggested this, not a single paper, journal publication and book...absolutely nothing, nada, zilch. I mean, how is this possible when even the works of an amateur mathematician like me has been published on a few sites? And I am just talking about the work I have posted without making use of a pseudonym. Odd...