Mathematicians...

The Loony Bin ( loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk )
Sun, 15 Sep 1996 18:29:59 +0100


Hiya People...

Here are some true tales of mathematicians...

Wishes & Dreams...

- ANDREA
        xx

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  ------- Forwarded foolishness follows -------

Albert Einstein, who fancied himself as a violinist, was rehearsing a
Haydn string quartet.  When he failed for the fourth time to get his
entry in the second movement, the cellist looked up and said, "The
problem with you, Albert, is that you simply can't count."

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Some famous mathematician was to give a keynote speech at a conference.
Asked for an advance summary, he said he would present a proof of
Fermat's Last Theorem -- but they should keep it under their hats.  When
he arrived, though, he spoke on a much more prosaic topic.  Afterwards
the conference organizers asked why he said he'd talk about the theorem
and then didn't.  He replied this was his standard practice, just in
case he was killed on the way to the conference.

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When I was a Math/Chem grad student at Princeton in 1973-74, there was a
story going around about a grad student.  This guy was always late. One
day he stumbled into class late, saw seven problems written on the
board, and wrote them down.  As the week went on he began to panic: the
math department at Princeton is fiercely competitive, and here he was
unable to do most of a simple homework assignment!  When the next class
rolled around he only had solved two of the problems, although he had a
pretty good idea of how to solve a third but not enough time to complete
it.

When he dejectedly flung his partial assignment on the prof's desk, the
prof asked him "What's that?"  "The homework."  "What homework?"
Eventually it came out that what the prof had written on the board were
the seven most important unsolved problems in the field.

This is largely an academic legend, at least according to Jan Harold
Brunvand, the author of a series of books on so-called Urban Legends. He
talks about it in his latest book _Curses!  Broiled Again!_ in the
chapter entitled "The Unsolvable Math Problem."  It is, however, based
in some fact.  The Stanford mathematician, George B. Danzig, apparently
managed to solve two statistics problems previously unsolved under
similar circumstances.

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The following problem can be solved either the easy way or the hard way.

Two trains 200 miles apart are moving toward each other; each one is
going at a speed of 50 miles per hour.  A fly starting on the front of
one of them flies back and forth between them at a rate of 75 miles per
hour.  It does this until the trains collide and crush the fly to death.
What is the total distance the fly has flown?

The fly actually hits each train an infinite number of times before it
gets crushed, and one could solve the problem the hard way with pencil
and paper by summing an infinite  series of distances.  The easy way is
as follows:  Since the trains are 200 miles apart and each train is
going 50 miles an hour, it takes 2 hours for the trains to collide.
Therefore the fly was flying for two hours.  Since the fly was flying at
a rate of 75 miles per hour, the fly must have flown 150 miles. That's
all there is to it.

When this problem was posed to John von Neumann, he immediately replied,
"150 miles."

"It is very strange," said the poser, "but nearly everyone tries to sum
the infinite series."

"What do you mean, strange?" asked Von Neumann.  "That's how I did it!"

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Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they
translate it into their own language, and forthwith it means something
entirely different.
                -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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"The reason that every major university maintains a department of
mathematics is that it is cheaper to do this than to institutionalize
all those people."