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GPS, Q4: Your students sometimes call you "Rebel King" (an anagram for Kleinberg). Tell us about the "Rebel King" phenomenon in the classroom.

This started in a large undergraduate course on discrete math for computer science majors in Fall 2000. The course was a lot of fun to teach -- there were more than 200 students in the class, but they were still willing to participate and discuss ideas during lecture, which made things much more lively. That was 7 years ago, so it's interesting how the tradition you mention persists, beyond the time span of any one Cornell undergraduate. (It's more than just the effect of having it preserved on Wikipedia, though that likely helps.)

But the fact that one can teach large classes and have students who are motivated and enthusiastic about participating -- this is a great thing. The experience of teaching and working with the undergraduates here is definitely one of the powerfully appealing features of being at Cornell. This year I'm again reminded of this, as David Easley and I finish teaching our large introductory undergraduate course on networks in the social, technological, and natural worlds. It was a great experience -- we had over 200 students from 25 different majors or intended majors -- and it was a reminder of how quickly research-level ideas can make their way down to the introductory college level, and eventually enter the general vocabulary more broadly.

Editor: The interview is continued in KDnuggets News 07:n12

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