"Straus told the story of the day that he and Einstein finished work on a paper...

"Straus told the story of the day that he and Einstein finished work on a paper. They looked for a paper clip to bind it together. After shuffling through several drawers, they finally found one lone clip. But it was so bent and mangled that it could not be used. So then they began looking for a tool to straighten the forlorn paper clip. Scrounging through more drawers, they finally found a full box of brand new paper clips. Einstein immediately began to shape one of the new clips into a tool for rectifying the bent clip."

"One day Shizuo Kakutani was teaching a class at Yale. He wrote a lemma on the blackboard and announced that the proof was obvious. One student timidly raised his hand and said that it wasn't obvious to him. Could Kakutani explain?

After several moments' thought, Kakutani realized that he could not himself prove the lemma. He apologized and said that he would report back at their next class meeting.

After class, Kakutani, went straight to his office. He labored for quite a time and found that he could not prove the pesky lemma. He skipped lunch and went to the library to track down the lemma. After much work, he finally found the original paper. The lemma was stated clearly and succinctly. For the proof, the author had written, 'Exercise for the reader.'

The author of this 1941 paper was Kakutani."

"After John Nash won the Nobel Prize in Economics, a small ceremony was held in the Final Hall Common Room at Princeton University. Nash was prevailed upon to make a few remarks. His first was, 'I hope that getting the Nobel will improve my credit rating, because I really want a credit card.'"

Hardy goes to visit Ramanujan in the hospital and mentions the number of his taxi was 14. "I'm afraid that riding in a cab with such a dull number is an ill omen," Hardy says. And Ramanujan replies, "No, not at all; 14 is a very interesting number. It is the only one which can be written as the product of 7 and 2 in two different ways."

I'm getting these from Kranz' "Mathematical Apocrypha." Satires of real ones are funny too.

Keep going. I love this.

Best one is the Shizuo story.

"One day Norbert Wiener was walking across the MIT campus when someone stopped him with a question on Fourier analysis. Wiener pulled out a slip of paper and wrote out the answer in some detail. The interlocutor was most grateful, thanked Wiener, and began to go his way. 'Just one moment,' said Wiener. "Which way was I walking when we met?" The man pointed in the direction Wiener was headed. 'Good', said Wiener. 'Then I've had my lunch.'"

"Erdős's lecture at Penn State was a large public event. He was the first speaker in a lecture series intended for the entire campus. At the time, Erdős was at the height of his public fame/notoriety. His talk attracted 2000 people. I of course gave him a flowery introduction, telling of how I had carried all of Erdős's worldly possessions in a flight bag in one hand. The distinguished scholar walked, indeed limped, to the front of the room and immediately took off his show and told how his foot was sore and had been bothering him for weeks. A couple weeks after Erdős left, my phone rang and I picked it up to hear, 'Erdős. My foot is much better.'

People used to say that you are not a real mathematician if you don't know Paul Erdős."

"One day David Hilbert and his wife were entertaining some people for dinner. About half an hour before guests were to arrive, Mrs. Hilbert told David to go change his clothes. He went upstairs, took off his jacket, his shirt, his shoes, his pants. Being a creature of habit, he then brushed his teeth, got into bed, and went to sleep. When the guests arrived, Hilbert was nowhere to be found. Mrs. Hilbert had to go upstairs and awaken her husband.

On another occasion, the Hilberts went to someone else's house for dinner. When they got home, Mrs. Hilbert chided David for not wearing a necktie. He subsequently mailed a necktie to the people, and instructed them to stare at it for three hours."

the absolute madman

"Stories of Marcel Riesz's unworldliness and impracticality abound. It is said that he could not pack a suitcase, nor figure out how a mailbox worked. He had the habit of hiding his paychecks under the mattress instead of cashing them. Adriano Garsia had to run to banks all over town cashing checks for Riesz the day for Riesz was scheduled to take one of his trips to Sweden."

"On one occasion, Gödel attended one of the Institute's biannual formal dinners. He was seated across from John Bahcall, the famous young astrophysicist. The two introduced themselves, and Bahcall related that he was a physicist. Gödel replied scornfully, 'I don't believe in natural science.'"

"John von Neumann always dressed like a banker, in a formal suit with a necktie and pocket handkerchief. Once von Neumann and his wife went on a vacation to Arizona, where they visited the Grand Canyon. Of course, von Neumann wanted to see everything and have the full experience. So they arranged to take a trip to the bottom, and were to ride down on pack mules. All the other participants showed up in the expected dress—short sleeves, chaps, cowboy boots, sombreros, and the like. John von Neumann had on the usual banker's suit, necktie, and pocket square."

"Gian-Carlo Rota recalls Alonzo Church from his undergraduate days at Princeton. Church looked like a cross between a panda and a large owl. He spoke softly in complete paragraphs, evenly and slowly enunciated. He never made casual remarks, for they could not be part of formal logic. He would never say, 'It is raining.' Taken in isolation, such a statement would make no sense for Church. Instead, he would say, 'I must postpone my departure for Nassau Street, inasmuch as it is raining, a fact which I can verify by looking out the window.'

Church's course in mathematical logic was a fixture of mathematical life at Princeton. Every lecture began with a 10-minute ceremony of erasing the blackboard until it was absolutely spotless. Sometimes the students would try to save him the effort by erasing the blackboard beforehand. This did not work. The ritual, performed by Church himself, could not be dispensed with. Often it required soap, water, and a brush; it was followed by another ten minutes of total silence while the blackboard was drying. Some thought that Chruch needed the time to prepare his lecture in his mind. This seems unlikely, as his lecture was an accurate rendition of the typescript that resided in the Fine Hall library."

"John von Neumann was an amazing mathematician and had an amazing calculator. He also had a photographic memory: he could effortlessly recite long passages from novels that he had read twenty years before. He of course played an instrumental role in developing one of the first stored-program computers at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In those days, von Neumann was extremely active as a consultant. He was constantly coming and going, all over the country, to government agencies and companies, giving out the benefit of his erudition.

During once of von Neumann's consulting trips, Herman Golstine and the others working on the new computer got it up and running for a test. They fed it a large amount of data from meteorological observations, ran it all night, and came up with very interesting solutions in the morning. Later that day, von Neumann returned from his trip. Wanting to pull a prank on Johnny von Neumann, they decided not to tell him that they had the computer up and running, but instead to present their results as though they had obtained them by hand. At tea, they told von Neumann that they had been working on such and such a problem, with and so data, and in the first case had come up with .... "No, no," said von Neumann. He put his hand to his forehead, threw his head back, and in a few moments gave them the answer. It was the same answer the machine had generated. They they said, "Well, in the second case we got .... "No, no," said von Neumann. "Let me think." He threw his head back—it took longer this time—but after several moments he came up with the answer. Finally his collaborators said, "Now in the third case ...." Again von Neumann insisted on doing the calculation himself. He threw his head back and thought and thought and thought. After several minutes he was still thinking and they blurted out the answer. John von Neumann came out of his trance and said, "Yes, that's it. How did you get there before I did?"

"Solomon Lefschetz' universally recognized trait was his rudeness. He once attended a lecture of Moore. Moore began a lecture by saying, "Let [math]a[/math] be a point and [math]b[/math] be a point." Lefschetz shouted, "But why don't you just say, 'Let [math]a[/math] and [math]b[/math] be points'?" Moore replied, "Because [math]a[/math] may be equal to [math]b[/math]." Lefschetz got up and left the room."

"Paul Erdős was a "natural mathematician." It was never how much he knew; it was rather how clever he was and how hard he tried. My colleague McDowell tells of working with Erdős nd a group of mathematicians at Purdue. They gathered in the morning, and someone went to the blackboard to present a problem: "Let [math]X[/math] be a Hausdorff space..." "What is a Hausdorff space?" asked Erdős. "Now assume that [math]X[/math] is separable..." "What is 'separable?'" asked Erdős. And on and on. But by the end of the day they had solved the problem and they could write a paper. The next day, in high spirits from their earlier success, they gathered again. Someone went to the blackboard to present a problem: "Let [math]X[/math] be a Hausdorff space..." "What is a Hausdorff space?" asked Erdős. And so it went."

"Logician Kurt Gödel was an eccentric and unworldly man who frequently needed to be protected from the vicissitudes of life by his friends. After Gödel had lived in this country for many years, he was persuaded to become an American citizen. He therefore began studying for the citizenship exam.

Unfortunately, as soon as Gödel began reading the U.S. Constitution, he discovered troubling logical loopholes. This insight cast him into deep distress. John von Neumann—Gödel's colleague at the Institute—was finally called in to convince Gödel that if you looked at things the right way then there would be no logical inconsistency.

Albert Einstein and the economist Oskar Morgenstern were the ones who chaperoned Gödel to the hearing for his citizenship application. The judge was overwhelmed by this opportunity to talk to Einstein, and they conversed at length about events in Nazi Germany. Finally, as an afterthought, the judge turned to Gödel and said, "But of course from your reading of the Constitution you now know that nothing like that could happen here." "As a matter of fact," Gödel began—but then, under the table, Morgenstern kicked Gödel. So Gödel got his citizenship after all."

"Presumably it was his preoccupation with mathematics that caused Stefan Bergman to appear to be out of touch with reality at times. For example, one day he went to the beach in northern California with a group of people, including a friend of mine who told me this yarn. Northern California beaches are cold, so when Bergman came out of the water he decided that he had better change into his street clothes. As he wandered off into the parking lot, seeking the car where he could get his blothes and change, his friends noticed that he was headed in the wrong direction. But they were used to this sort of behavior and paid him no mind. In a while, Bergman returned—clothed—but plainly not in his own clothes. He exclaimed, 'You know there is the most unfriendly woman in our car!'"

The point of these stories is that mathematicians are autists
Is that it?

Not all great autists are mathematicians, but all great mathematicians are great autists.

Gold

Me vote for this.

10/10

I want to see a ms paint comic of that it would be perfect posting material.

This thread is gold

nice thread OP

MANIAC was originally joked to be "Metropolis and Neumann invent awful computer."

btfo so hard

SAVAGE
A
V
A
G
E

You sound like a moron when you speak like that. Just so you know.

I saw Alexander Grothendieck at a grocery store in France yesterday. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything.

He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?”

I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying.

The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter.

When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.

kek

In 1991 during the P Delign IAS conference Andrew Wiles (who was there presenting a talk on early Modular Curve work) was relaxing by the beach with other fellows from Oxford when a small child was dragged under the waves and began to struggle to stay above surface. As his colleagues rushed to help, Wiles held out an arm infront of them, stopping them and was reported saying by John Coates (who had served as his Doctoral overseer) "The waves have claimed her, let her fight for her own life". The mathematicians, dumbfounded, proceeded to watch her struggle until her body disappeared beneath the waves, lifeless. He was later spotted outside the child's house, making drowning gestures and thanking the family for their child's sacrifice to the great ocean.

Okay, now the real question is which scientist is gonna have the Evian bottle

I appreciate it. Good content Veeky Forums

I used to believe most mathematicians were normal despite the crazy stories I hear on the internet, but now I can believe them after my encounter with Terence Tao.

Dude's a weird guy. I work as a waiter at a decent restaurant in LA and he came in this weekend with a bunch of friends.

I'll try to cliffs this:

-go up to their table and try to contain my excitement that I'm waiting on the Kung-Tao Chicken
-Kung-Tao looks at me and says he'll have a steak with ketchup
-All his weird folk/hipster friends order
-As I leave to go back to the kitchen, Kung-Tao walks behind me and tries to come in
-I ask him if he's looking for the bathroom
-He says no angrily and tells me he's there to cook his steak so the chef doesn't poison it
-I try to tell him he can't do that and assure him that no one will poison his food
-Kung-Tao ain't having it
-Manager comes and assures Kung-Tao his steak won't be poisoned
-Kung-Tao asks him if he wants his teeth kicked in
-Kung-Tao and his friends are kicked out
-When I go to leave that night, I see Kung-Tao across the street wearing his Fields Medal
-He keeps taking the medal on and off as he watches me drive away


Having your dreams crushed is the worst feeling imaginable.... I'm still feeling down from that day

(You)

this

I saw Terence Tao at a grocery store in Los Angeles yesterday. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything.
He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?”
I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying.
The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter.
When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.

Jesus Christ if you story is true hes not just some regular eccentric weirdo like he is legit fucking not right in the head

Another real one from OP's book:

Tommy Tompkins was a professor of mathematics at UCLA. He was known to tipple- during the day- sometimes to excess. Unfortunately one day he was sitting at his office desk and flipped over backwards, hitting his head. He was found dead by the janitor a few days later.

Tompkins had an unusual way of meeting his office hours. He would sit at the desk with his door open. If a student appeared, he would crawl under the desk until the student went away. Worked like a charm.

Tao is a fucking asshole

He gave a lecture in my university, he would pick students at random and make them do fast calculations like 3,841,897 multiplied by 6! and such, and if they got them wrong, he would clap in their face and tell them to imagine "the sin wave of a dual particle to do the calculations" (whatever that means)

How is this acceptable at a university...I would of just stared straight and fucking ignored him

Is this pure OC? It kekked me pretty good.

You think that's bad? You should have seen his lecture at mine. Whenever he'd ask a question and not get a response immediately, he'd glare at the audience and then whisper for the next 5 minutes before returning to normal volume

Diogenes has always been noted for his eccentric behavior. On a normal day, Diogenes was found walking backwards along a city street. A group of people in his way began to laugh at him. As they laughed, Diogenes replied, "Aren't you ashamed, you who walk backward along the whole path of existence, and blame me for walking backward along the path of the promenade?"

LOL

these stories sound so fucking out there, that i dont really believe it

Finally. Now please leave Veeky Forums and take your chat acronyms with you. You are clearly both new and underage, because I refuse to believe there is an adult as credulous as you.

>"I may be acting like a real retard now, but you all fucking suck. Boom, in your face, biatches."

How witty.

>it's a "Diogenes ruins yet another perfect afternoon" episode

LOL
you are dumb xD

>acts like a retard and then btfo's the whole civilization

Typical diogenes

When Renee Descartes was a child, he was often sick, so the teachers at his boarding school let him stay in bed until noon. He went on staying in bed until noon for almost all his life. While in bed, Descartes thought about math and philosophy.
One day, Descartes noticed a fly crawling around on the ceiling. He watched the fly for a long time. He wanted to know how to tell someone else where the fly was. Finally he realized that he could describe the position of the fly by its distance from the walls of the room. When he got out of bed, Descartes wrote down what he had discovered. Then he tried describing the positions of points, the same way he described the position of the fly. Descartes had invented the coordinate plane!

You're a bit uptight loosen up a bit.

good pasta

I know a chem E prof who graded his own answer key for an exam w/o realizing it and only gave it a 93/100.

With great maths comes great autism

>Think my eccentricities mean I'm intelligent
>Turns out I'm just exciteable and like to act retarded

well shit

I once got an email saying I got the highest possible mark on my essay - 85/100.

Thank you for the useless history class

Now frack off

Hello sweet summer child

jews btfo

>would of
Man, you're not in college or university. Quit pretending what you
>would've
Done

>would of

lmao

I met Konstantin Novoselov some years ago shortly after he had been awarded his prize. He gave a lecture about graphene during which he made a bit of fun at Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory for having all of his equations wrong (but at least the writers tried).

Afterwards people harangued him about graphene and material science and yadda yadda yadda so when I got a chance I just asked him how was he enjoying copenhagen, how long would he be here for, and gave him some pointers on where to go to have some fun.

I got invited to lunch with him, and my professors came along and again they started to get on his case about the science and he looked tired of it all. So I brought up good old politics and we had a lively discussion about US/Russian relations, globalism, and the unabashed political censorship of the nobel committe (he had an anecdote about one of the other winners that year who was forced to repeatedly change his acceptance speech, because it didn't fit in with the globalist agenda of the day).

Dude was serious bro-tier.