Math Prof Wigs Out On United Flight

How would you react if a woman started screaming that "she had a baby named Jesus, she was impregnated by her uncle and President Bush was behind it all"?

And then started to strip and throw things at other people?

If we mentioned that this happened on an airplane in flight. would that make your decision any easier?

For the captain of United Airlines Flight 6664 from Eugene, OR to Denver, who had the bizarrely misbehaving woman as a passenger, the answer was simple enough: stop the plane and kick her off. So the United jet made an unscheduled landing in Salt Lake City, where the police took custody of one Bogdana Atanasova Georgieva.

Georgieva is a Bulgarian citizen living in Eugene, where she's a graduate student at the University of Oregon. According to a story in the Eugene Register-Guard, she's quite the math and science whiz, working on a master's degree in Physics to go with her PhD and several other degrees, all earned in various Oregon schools.

She is -- or was -- an assistant professor of mathematics at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, as well. We say "or was" because she's been purged from the current math department directory on the web, but she still appears in the Google cache.  Every page of a dozen or so that referred to her has been sanitized.

A web page still exists at U of Oregon, which has a picture (the one with this article) and descriptions of her research into things like the "Generalized Variational Principle of Herglotz". Whatever that is.

She sure is bright, but is she nuts? Professionals at the University of Utah hospital are studying that question right now, as Georgieva was taken there for evaluation.

One thing's for sure: she disrupted Flight 6664. She began by tussling with an adjacent passenger for a bottle of water. Then she assaulted the passenger, who had asked flight attendants for assistance moving to another seat. Then she began yelling about her baby Jesus, her diddling uncle, etc., and then, during the Salt Lake City landing, she broke loose and allegedly ran towards the cockpit.

She was thwarted by flight attendants, and then tackled by other passengers, who held her for the police. *Still* she got away again, uttering a bomb threat, before being caught and caged.

She has been charged with one felony count of Interfering With a Flight Crew by the Salt Lake City US Attorney's office.

When, of course, that mental evaluation is done.

FMI: www.uoregon.edu/~bogdana/ (Georgieva's U of Oregon webpage, which is still up at this writing).