Who would remember something like that after two years?
I think most academics do.
My own story: When I was an undergraduate student, I wrote a paper which gave sharp bounds on the round-off errors resulting from computing FFTs using floating-point arithmetic; and I noticed that my bound was much better than the bound given by Higham in his Numerical Analysis textbook (which is, by quite a wide margin, the most widely used textbook in the field). I sent him an email -- "Dear sir, I noticed that in section X.Y of this book, you prove a bound of N sqrt(N) log(N) instead of N log(N); if you change foo to bar in your argument, you'll get the stronger bound which I prove in my paper (see attachment)" -- and he wrote back to thank me and tell me that he would make sure the improved bound was in the next edition of the textbook.
A year later, a copy of said textbook arrived in the mail, "compliments of the author".
Two years after that, when I was a graduate student at a different university, I went to a talk by Higham; and at the end when we were asked for questions, I introduced myself (by name, no mention of FFTs) and asked a question. Higham answered my question, and then went on -- in front of most of the department -- to announce that I had found an error in the first edition of his textbook, and that when I wrote to him he had assumed that I was a professor rather than an undergraduate student.
I think "star professors" are actually more likely to remember things like this, simply because someone pointing out something they didn't know, or a mistake they made, is so unusual. It's people like Chomsky, Higham, and Knuth who remember such contributions and can afford to send out free books -- or $2.56 cheques -- to those who provide them.
But the thing Higham remembered was orders of magnitude more significant than thing I was talking about, which was genuinely trivial.
Still, I take your point that among true star professors this kind of brilliant decency isn't as uncommon as I made out. I was using the term "star professor" a little more ironically than that.
I definitely disagree with what you said about most academics, though!
My research advisor was a star professor in a big name school. Also very arrogant. He considered me one of his best students (so no personal axe to grind), but I was turned off by his arrogance. Moral of the story: you can't generalize!
While I agree about the perils of generalization, the problem in this case is not that - it's that we're using the term "star professor" ambiguously. My fault for not being clearer in the first place.
I think most academics do.
My own story: When I was an undergraduate student, I wrote a paper which gave sharp bounds on the round-off errors resulting from computing FFTs using floating-point arithmetic; and I noticed that my bound was much better than the bound given by Higham in his Numerical Analysis textbook (which is, by quite a wide margin, the most widely used textbook in the field). I sent him an email -- "Dear sir, I noticed that in section X.Y of this book, you prove a bound of N sqrt(N) log(N) instead of N log(N); if you change foo to bar in your argument, you'll get the stronger bound which I prove in my paper (see attachment)" -- and he wrote back to thank me and tell me that he would make sure the improved bound was in the next edition of the textbook.
A year later, a copy of said textbook arrived in the mail, "compliments of the author".
Two years after that, when I was a graduate student at a different university, I went to a talk by Higham; and at the end when we were asked for questions, I introduced myself (by name, no mention of FFTs) and asked a question. Higham answered my question, and then went on -- in front of most of the department -- to announce that I had found an error in the first edition of his textbook, and that when I wrote to him he had assumed that I was a professor rather than an undergraduate student.
I think "star professors" are actually more likely to remember things like this, simply because someone pointing out something they didn't know, or a mistake they made, is so unusual. It's people like Chomsky, Higham, and Knuth who remember such contributions and can afford to send out free books -- or $2.56 cheques -- to those who provide them.