This Ivy League economist was pulled off a flight and interrogated because he was working on an equation that looked like “terrorist code”
An award-winning economist, who has had stints working at Princeton and Stanford's Hoover Institution, was pulled off a plane and interrogated after his scribbled notes were confused as being a terrorist "code".
Guido Menzio, a tenured associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who has been awarded the prestigious Carlo Alberto Medal for young economists, was interrogated after a fellow passenger on board American Airlines Flight 3950 from Philadelphia to Syracuse flagged his behaviour to a flight attendant before lift-off.
According to the Washington Post, the woman passed a note to one of the crew members and was taken off the plane saying she was feeling ill.
Read more: The UK's most powerful economists
Menzio was then approached by the pilot who was also removed from the plan "and taken to meet some sort of agent, though he wasn't entirely sure of the agent's affiliation".
And then the big reveal: The woman wasn’t really sick at all. Instead this quick-thinking traveler had Seen Something, and so she had Said Something.
That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.
The curly-haired man laughed.
He laughed because those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or another foreign language, or even some special secret terrorist code. They were math.
Yes, math. A differential equation, to be exact.
The Italian economist – who has dark, curly hair and a "foreign" accent – was on a connecting flight to Ontario, where he was planning to give a talk on the working paper he had co-authored about menu costs and price dispersion. The notes were simply him trying to work out some properties in the model he was about to present.
Read more: The best UK universities to read economics
After Menzio showed the authorities his notes, he was allowed to return to his seat – but the 41-minute flight was delayed by more than two hours.
The woman never returned to her seat.
A spokesman for American Airlines said this sort of thing happens "from time to time" but declined to provide further details.