S.M.Singru
From Oxford, U.K. comes this story of an undergraduate in engineering who was invited to China for a lecture on global economics to a group of Ph.D. students. He gave the lecture to the group as scheduled. Was he a boy prodigy? No, plain and simple imposter. You see, 23 year old Mathew Richardson of Oxford University received this invitation and, for the sake of being able to make a trip to China, accepted it. On his flight to Beijing, he browsed through a textbook on global economics for undergraduates, and without batting an eyelid, delivered he lecture. However, when it came to answering questions raised at the end, he decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and vanished. O.K., how did he come to be invited? Rather incredibly. There is a Professor Mathew Richardson at the business school at New York University and instead of sending the letter to the Professor at New York; it got addressed to the student at Oxford.