GS Chandy
Posts:
6,645
From:
Hyderabad, Mumbai/Bangalore, India
Registered:
9/29/05
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Re: Largest Known Prime Number Discovered
Posted:
Feb 18, 2013 11:14 AM
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Wayne Bishop posted Feb 18, 2013 9:14 AM:
>
> My own (genuine) story along that line is not a
> joke but the real thing in reverse. The
> strongest faculty member I had in graduate school
> was Stanislas Mrowka, a student of Kuratowski,
> who was only at Western Michigan for one year
> because he was not able to command the salary he
> thought he was worth at the SUNY school that he
> wanted to be at and otherwise would've hired him
> so he was playing a game of chicken with them to
> prove that he was not asking too much. That year
> he published 12(?) papers and taught a beautiful
> 3 term sequence in point-[set topology. He
> always carried a big leather bag but there was
> nothing in it except the makins for his constant
> pipe. He brought several students with him for
> the year who said that he wrote papers the same
> way. Just sat down and wrote the paper almost
> perfectly with the references listed but for his
> students to put in the exact reference
> details. Anyway, at the end of the last lecture
> of the last class he got well into a proof of
> something up in the unattainable ordinals, backed
> away from the board and stared at it puffing on
> his pipe, and then announced, "That's not going to
> work," and walked out.
>
> Wayne
>
Beautiful! Thank you.
(It's been a loooo..ng time - but I seem to recall from my math grad school days that there were quite a number of stories about Kuratowski. Let me see if I can later recall some of them [in due course of time]).
GSC
>
> At 10:09 PM 2/16/2013, GS Chandy wrote:
> >Joe Niederberger posted Feb 16, 2013 10:59 PM:
> > > GS Chandy writes:
> > > >Indeed, it has lost punch. Unless it was a poor
> joke
> > > to begin with.
> > >
> > > Oh, I kinda liked it, pretty good for math jokes.
> > >
> > > Here's one:
> > > A mathematics professor was lecturing
> > > to a class of students. As he wrote something
> > > on the board, he said to the class
> > > âOf course, this is immediately obvious.â
> > > Upon seeing the blank stares of the students,
> > > he turned back to contemplate
> > > what he had just written. He began to
> > > pace back and forth, deep in thought.
> > > After about 10 minutes, just as the silence
> > > was beginning to become uncomfortable,
> > > he brightened, turned to the
> > > class and said, âYes, it IS obvious.â
> > >
> >Now THAT'S an excellent math joke (IMHO)! I
> >recall that one of my grad school professors
> >used to do almost exactly that. (He didn't take
> >quite 10 minutes to arrive at his 'conclusion' of
> course).
> > >
> > > More here:
> > > http://www.ams.org/notices/200501/fea-dundes.pdf
> > >
> >I shall look forward to reading those.
> >
> >GSC
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