The limerick I used to introduce Emmanuel Candes

I was assigned the task of introducing Emmanuel Candes for his invited talk at SODA. After getting tired of my incessant pacing up and down the hotel room at 3am mumbling about the text of the intro, my roommate took pity on me and composed a cute little limerick for the occasion.

Now whether it was madness, desperation or both, I don't know. But I decided to use that limerick to open the introduction, much to the consternation of my (unnamed) roommate, who hadn't intended his little throwaway to take on such prominence.

But use it I did, and it didn't fall entirely flat, for which I am very grateful. I won't out the composer unless he does it himself :), but here's the limerick:

There once was a professor from Caltech
who represented his signals with curvelets
But upon reflection
realized, he'd prefer projection
As they could better capture sparse sets.

Thank you all: I'll be here all night....