Idiosyncrasies of Some Great Scientists

swarrier:

I have read Hodges book but not the other two. I have read another biography of Ramanujan. I first learned of Ramanujan in 1969. I was checking out a paper on ``Perturbation`` theory in a mathematical journal and the author quoted Ramanujan. My curiosity immediately led me to Hardy`s book on Ramanujan.

Incidentally, Einstein had many flings outside his marriage. I had written about it in my article ``Einstein`s Love Life`` at Chowk.com on July 20, 2005. Church Turing Tarski thesis to which you have alluded seems interesting. I`ll see if I can procure the book.

Mohammad Gill

Re: # 32

It was Shockley who was the racist and supported eugenics.

I`m not sure about what you say about Einstein is true. Recently there was a program on PBS called Einstein`s wife (his first wife Mileva Maric) where there were claims that she helped him in his initial papers. However that, in the opinion of a lot of scientists is junk, just wishful theorizing. While it is true that Einstein was a bit vain and liked to be photographed , he may not have been that promiscuous.

However as somebody said , ``Behind every genius lies a flawed human being``.

Re: # 31
Dr. Gill
We were introduced to Ramanujam in school funnily enough through our English textbooks initially. Then again it is difficult to be a South Indian and not have, Ramanujam, Sir C V Raman, Chandrashekhar Subramanyam etc drilled into one`s head.

Have you read ``The Man who knew infinity`` , the biography of Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel? I heard they are thinking of making a movie on it. It`s an interesting book.

Incidentally there is a very good biography of Alan Turing by Andrew Hodges. It`s a sympathetic potrayal of a enigmatic man.

An interesting discussion on the Church Turing Tarski thesis is present in ``Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid`` by Douglas Hofstadter.

I must thank you for writing this article.

Re: # 31
Great scientists were not always angels and could be terrible characters troo.
Newton was very jealous and very suspicious of others and hpossessed very nasty temper.
Roberst Hook was his equal in his nastiness.
One of the inventors either Shockley or Bardeen was a pukkah racist and published articles stating that blacks were inferrior.
Einstein used to visit smelliest prostitutes in Berlin and used to have sex with women visitors when his wife was working in the kitchen. Actually she died heart broken. He is now no more an icon these days because of this his personal characteristics!
Heisburg was pretty anti-semetic.
But they were all brilliant!

swarrier:

When you talk about Hardy, it is inevitable not to think of Ramanujan also. Ramanujan was an associate of Hardy at Cambridge.

According to Jonathan Borwein and Peter Borwein, Ramaswami Aiyar, the founder of the Indian Mathematical Society, encouraged Ramanujan to ``communicate his results to three prominent British mathematicians. Two apparently did not respond; the one who did was G.H.Hardy of Cambridge, now regarded as the foremost British mathematician of the period.

Hardy, accustomed to receivibg crank mail, was inclined to disregard Ramanujan`s letter at first glance the day it arrived, January 16, 1913. But after dinner that night Hardy and a close colleague, John E. Littlewood, sat down to puzzle through a list of 120 formulas and theorems Ramanujan had appended to his letter. Some hours later they had reached a verdict: they were seeing the work of a genius and not a crackpot. (According to his own pure-talent scale of mathematicians, Hardy was later to rate Ramanujan a 100, Littlewood a 30 and himself a 25. The German mathematician David Hilbert, the most influential figure of the time, merited only an 80.).``

Hardy also wrote, ``The real crises of my career came ten or twelve years later, in 1911, when I began my collaboration with Littlewood, and in 1913, when I discovered Ramanujan. All my best work since then has been bound up with theirs, and it is obvious that my association with them was the decisive event of my life. I still say to myself when I am depressed, and find myself forced to listen to pompous and tiresome people, ``Well, I have done one thing you could never have done, and that is to have collaborated with both Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.``

Ramanujan was made a Fellow of Royal Society of London and a Fellow of Trinity College in 1917 - the first Indian to be aarded either honor.

Mohammad Gill

The British Mathematician G H Hardy claimed all his life not to believe in God, but he spent a lot of time worrying about it.

The anecdote is related by C.P. Snow in his introduction to A Mathematician`s Apology. It is a pleasant May evening some time in the 1930`s and Hardy is in his fifties. He and Snow are walking at Fenner`s cricket ground when the 6 o`clock chimes ring out from the nearby Catholic chapel. ``It is rather unfortunate``, Hardy remarks, ``that some of the happiest hours of my life should have been spent within sound of a Roman Catholic church`

He was also eccentric enough to encompass the God he never believed in. He was also a great cricket fan and loved to watch cricket and hated it to rain during a cricket match . Again from C. P. Snow.

When summer came, it was taken for granted that we should meet at the cricket ground,`` C.P. Snow once recalled. ``[G. H. Hardy] made for his favourite place, opposite the pavilion, where he could catch each ray of sun - he was obsessively heliotropic. In order to deceive the sun into shining, he brought with him, even on a fine May afternoon, what he called his `anti-God battery`. This consisted of three or four sweaters, an umbrella belonging to his sister, and a large envelope containing mathematical manuscripts, such as a Ph.d. dissertation, a paper which he was refereeing for the Royal Society, or some tripos answers. He would explain to an acquaintance that God, believing that Hardy expected the weather to change and give him a chance to work, counter-suggestibly arranged that the sky should remain cloudless, and then he (Hardy) would be able to enjoy the cricket in perfect sunshine.``

This bit from the Andrews Univerity web site.

He also hated being photographed, and hated mirrors so much that he would cover any mirror in a hotel room he entered, with a towel. Another example of him trying to fool God was when on a trip back from Denmark he sent back a telegram claiming he had proved the Reimann hypothesis. He reasoned that God would not allow the boat to sink on the return journey and give him the same fame that Fermat had achieved with his ``last theorem``.

Re: # 27 by tahmed

You are perhaps right. However, there are several `hidden assumptions` in Nash`s construct. For starters, imagine you have to divide three cars of the same make between two identical persons. How will you get symmetry (fairness)?

Dr. Gill, sorry for deviating from the topic. Am off for a week:)

Re: # 27 by tahmed

You are perhaps right. However, there are several `hidden assumptions` in Nash`s construct. For starters, imagine you have to divide three cars of the same make between two identical persons. How will you get symmetry (fairness)?

Dr. Gill, sorry for deviating from the topic. Am off for a week:)

GT #24 Thanks for taking the time to explain, which you have done quite clearly and I get the general idea as a result.

Agreed Outcome 2 in particular is interesting I think since requires both parties to agree on what is fair. Seems to me the popular book ``Getting to Say Yes`` (i.e. the art of negotiating) is on the same lines (and is perhaps inspired by Nash`s work). Thus, that book provides some good pointers towards reaching agreement on any issue - most notable is the pointer that one should separate the respective bargaining positions from the underlying interests . This I think is a good approach to resolving any dispute - namely, for both parties to focus on their own as well as the other parties underlying interest, rather than digging their heels in on the particular position they took at the start of the bargaining session and rejecting solutions that may meet their underlying interests in an equal or even better manner.

I am not sure how much all this is along the lines of Nash`s Bargaining Solution though, although the book seems to be using Agreed Outcome 2 as the take-off point.

Wilhelm Reich was one of the most intelligent students of Sigmund Freud. he was also known for his leftist leanings. He tried to put forward a theory based on Marxist and Freudian principles to solve the problems of the society.......he called it ``Freudo-Marxism``, but he developed Schizophrenia and faded away from the scene very fast.

irfanhamid and other interactors:
I don`t know much about lambda calculus; my interest in computation theories was of historical nature. But I am glad to see that the article has provoked some interesting discussion.
Similarly, I don`t know much about theory of games; I didn`t even mention John Nash in the article. He became sick at the age of 30 years. Many strange things that he believed in and reacted to were due to his illness. So I didn`t want to commingle his strange acts with idiosyncracies.
Mohammad Gill

Re: # 21 by tahmed32

This is quite a challenge for me, but here goes: Imagine a situation where two guys are deciding to split a cake amongst themselves. Suppose instead of demanding pieces of cakes for themselves they decide on the properties that the bargaining outcome should have. Let them decide that: (1) No part of the cake should be wasted (Pareto Optimality); (2) the outcome is `fair` (symmetry); (3) the outcome should not change when the bargainers are given the option of bargaining over something else also (independence of irrelevant alternatives); and (4) a technical condition on the utilities derived from the outcome. Then, Nash shows that, there is a unique outcome that satisfies these four conditions (i.e. the bargainers do not have to go through the act of bargaining). This outcome is called the Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS). Actually he shows that NBS is equivalent to the conditions from 1 to 4.

Hope this helps. Sorry for not being able to do a better job. Plus, do keep in mind that assumption (3) as defined by Nash is actually much more subtle than my verbal description.

#16 Tesla was as imaginative an inventor as Edison. But Edison had more street smarts. Tesla developed the AC (which requires smaller copper wire and is otherwise more economical, and Edison`s DC) to which Westinghouse bought patent rights.

So, to scare people away from the competition, Edison promoted the scare that AC was a killer - and to do that he used AC to fry the neighborhood cats and dogs. He then pushed for development of the Electric Chair using AC, thus burning the idea that AC was associated with death while DC was associated with the light bulb. Edison got his money out of it, Tesla moved on to other inventions, and the whole world paid a price by the confusion caused by Edison - until, as it always does, the truth came out.

Excellent article Gill sahib. The lives of top-echelon scientists are often very interesting, so are their personalities. As for your contention about Turing Machines outshining the Lambda calculus, it is true only from a pedagogic point of view. As mentioned by an interactor they are both equivalent. But whereas Turing machines haven`t given birth to much more ``usable`` techniques, so it remains a rather simple and interesting theoretical tool to play with in sophomore year classes on CS theory. The Lambda calculus, on the other hand, has spawned the whole branch of programming language semantics and to some extent, proof theory.

@AlephNull,
The Laplace transform was ``invented`` by Leonhard Euler, popularized by Laplace (hence the name) and used for solving differential equations by Heaviside.

Some interesting quotes by Einstein:

1. An hour can seem like a minute when talking to a pretty girl, a minute can seem like an hour while sitting on a hot stove. THAT`S the theory of relativity.
2. Marilyn Monroe once proposed to Einstein to have his baby ``imagine if he has my looks and your brain``. Einstein is reputed to have said ``madam, I fear that it be the reverse``.

Regards,
Irfan.

GT: Could you describe the Nash Bargaining Solution for Dummies? (i.e. in plain english, for dummies like me).

``Nash accomplished the much more difficult task of formulating a theory of non-cooperative games which allows more than two parties in the game and none of them has to be a loser in the relative sense.``

You mean Nash defined, and proved the existence, of a solution concept for non zero-sum games. That such games existed, was known to V-N and M. The solution concept provided by Nash, called the Nash equilibrium, is a fixed point in `best response correspondences`. Nash`s contemporaries did not think very highly of this concept, neither did V-N. A very nice, but dated, text on game-theory by Luce and Raiffa barely mentions Nash. Today, cutting edge theorists are also wary of the Nash equilibrium. Nash is also responsible for discovering the Nash Bargaining Solution.