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To: Right Wing Professor
I had no idea a mathematician would have such difficulty with common English words.

Nor I. I wouldn't have even claimed that you were using jargon.

174 posted on 11/25/2005 6:23:07 PM PST by Doctor Stochastic (Vegetabilisch = chaotisch ist der Charakter der Modernen. - Friedrich Schlegel)
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To: Doctor Stochastic
I had no idea a mathematician would have such difficulty with common English words.

From this website about Norber Weiner, John Von Neumann, and other mathematicians...

Apparently many mathematicians have difficulties with common English words.

Weiner was in fact very absent minded. The following story is told about him: When they moved from Cambridge to Newton his wife, knowing that he would be absolutely useless on the move, packed him off to MIT while she directed the move. Since she was certain that he would forget that they had moved and where they had moved to, she wrote down the new address on a piece of paper, and gave it to him. Naturally, in the course of the day, an insight occurred to him. He reached in his pocket, found a piece of paper on which he furiously scribbled some notes, thought it over, decided there was a fallacy in his idea, and threw the piece of paper away. At the end of the day he went home (to the old address in Cambridge, of course). When he got there he realized that they had moved, that he had no idea where they had moved to, and that the piece of paper with the address was long gone. Fortunately inspiration struck. There was a young girl on the street and he conceived the idea of asking her where he had moved to, saying, "Excuse me, perhaps you know me. I'm Norbert Weiner and we've just moved. Would you know where we've moved to?" To which the young girl replied, "Yes daddy, mommy thought you would forget."

The capper to the story is that I asked his daughter (the girl in the story) about the truth of the story, many years later. She said that it wasn't quite true -- that he never forgot who his children were! The rest of it, however, was pretty close to what actually happened...

Cheers!

228 posted on 11/25/2005 9:43:15 PM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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