Coffee
For some reason I have become more addicted to caffeine. I know this is very unhealthy.The Hungarians historically have been a very mathematical people. Back in the old days, a whole third of Stanford's mathematical faculty were Hungarian refugees, George Polya being one of the most famous among them.
Some of these Hungarian fellas' also gave us great anecdotes about coffee. Dr. Alfred Renyi, today with a whole institute named after him in Budapest, once remarked:
"A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems."
This is the guy who proved that every even integer is the sum of a prime and an "almost prime number" (one with only two prime factors.)
His compatriot and friend Paul Turan carried his theorem one step further:
"Weak coffee is fit only for lemmas."
Who knows? Maybe coffee can make me less mathematically-unsophisticated. Maybe it really works. Maybe I should drink more of it and get a little more insightful.
posted by James Chang @ 10:17 AM
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