Anecdotes on Mathematicians

Anecdotes on Mathematicians
John Milnor
He got to class late one day and copied down a list of problems from the board. The next class he complained “These problems were too hard. I could only solve two of them.” But they were a list of unsolved problems, and one of his solutions is now known as the Fary-Milnor theorem.
Leonard Euler
Diderot was becoming a nuisance at Katherine the Great's court, preaching atheism, and Euler was asked to shut him up. Euler said to Diderot: “Sir, (a + bn)/n = x, therefore God exists; reply!”
Condorcet tells this story of Euler’s mental arithmetic prowess. Two of Euler’s students had summed a series of 17 terms and their answers disagreed in the 50th decimal place. Euler did the calculation in his head (correctly) to decide who was right.
Isaac Newton
Solving the brachistochrone (shortest time) curve problem. Newton got home from a hard day at the mint very tired at 3am, found the problem in the his mailbox and solved it by morning. It had taken Johann Bernoulli two weeks to solve it.
Ernst G. Straus
* At Erdos's 60th birthday conference at Keszthely, on the North shore of Lake Balaton, Erdos put a list of 10 unsolved problems on the blackboard, but before he finished writing the list, Straus shouts out “I think I have a solution to problem 3,” and he did have one.
* The Rand Corporation sent out a list of “significant problems” that mathematicians should work on. Straus answered two of them by return post. They were embarrassed and never did this again.
Paul Erdos
Erdos sees a problem on the board in coffee room at Texas A&M University, and he writes a 3 line proof on the board. Jack Bryan had just finished writing a 25 page proof.
Mark Kac
Kac said “A truth is a statement whose opposite is false.
A profound truth is a statement whose opposite is also a profound truth.”
Joseph Fourier
*His second paper, the one on the heat equation, that introduced Fourier Series to the world, kept being rejected by the French Academy. Eventually, he became its President and ordered its publication.
Paul T. Bateman and Jacques Hadamard
Jacques Hadamard proved the Prime Number Theorem in the 19th century.
Paul T. Bateman knew him and lived until December 2012. How is this possible?
Louis Mordell
Mordell, who had been invited to Calgary University by Richard K. Guy, was a frequent attender at their weekly Number Theory seminar. One week he fell asleep, as was his habit, as the lecture proceeded. At some point someone in the audience said: "Actually, that's Stickelberger's theorem." "No it isn't," replied the speaker. A few minutes later, the same person said: "No, I'm sure that's Stickelberger's theorem." The speaker denied this emphatically. The lecture ended, and the applause woke up Mordell, who looked up and pointed at the board, saying "There's old Stickelberger's result."
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