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From: leimkuhl@uiucdcsp.CS.UIUC.EDU
Newsgroups: net.math
Subject: Re: a piece of folk-lore
Message-ID: <9600018@uiucdcsp>
Date: Mon, 23-Sep-85 16:35:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: uiucdcsp.9600018
Posted: Mon Sep 23 16:35:00 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 24-Sep-85 23:43:24 EDT
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Nf-From: uiucdcsp.CS.UIUC.EDU!leimkuhl Sep 23 15:35:00 1985
I have heard it was Von Neumann. (Raymond Smullyan, <>)
But you know, famous academicians tend to become the focus
of an abundance of jokes, mythical conversations, and legends. My
theory is that they are 99% crap.
Some scientists seem even to propagate these stories themselves;
Feynmann, for example, seems to be trying to bury himself in fiction.
Partly this is great egotism--by encouraging myths that call attention
to his peculiar genius, Feynmann appears larger than life, and probably
some of those anecdotes will still be in vogue when his work on
quantum chromodynamics is ancient history.
Witness this story about the young Gauss: as an elementary school
pupil, his teacher is said to have become exasperated with the class
and as a punishment, ordered them to sum the integers from 1 to 100.
A few minutes pass and Gauss (the worst of the brats) cheerily announces
the answer. He is said to have recognized the trick of forming the
pairs (100+1), (99+2),..,(51+50), and so to have seen that the answer was
just 50*101--this for the first time!
I don't know whether this is true or false--there's no doubt
that Gauss at age ten was a far better mathematician than most of us
will ever hope to be--but notice how this story is still quite popular.
Such stories tend to cling to great men--the greater the man, the more
stories are told about him. I think Einstein had a particular problem
with being made the center of stories--his famous line "God doesn't
play dice with the universe" may not have been his. (He is said to
stated this at a banquet in an argument with a quantum theorist.)
-Ben Leimkuhler