Still Waters

Gauss’ scientific diary was a great boon to mathematical historians, but his notes could be frustratingly cryptic. On July 10, 1796, he made this entry:

ΕΥΡΗΚΑ! num = Δ + Δ + Δ

He had discovered that every positive integer is the sum of at most three triangular numbers.

Among the 146 entries, two remain completely opaque. On Oct. 11, 1796, Gauss had written:

Vicimus GEGAN.

And on April 8, 1799:

gauss diary entry

No one knows what either of these means — if they had mathematical significance, it was lost with Gauss.

So it goes. Dirichlet was famously uncommunicative, not even informing his family that his wife had given birth. His father-in-law later complained that he “should at least have been able to write 2 + 1 = 3.”

| Science & Math

Barren

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Pentland_MAHAFFY.jpeg

Trinity College provost John Pentland Mahaffy was arguing with a women’s rights advocate when she asked him, “What is the difference between man and woman?”

He considered and said, “Madam, I can’t conceive.”

| Society

Typing in Tongues

A hoax which did not deceive the learned, but sorely puzzled them, was that known as the Dutch Mail hoax. Some fifty years ago, an article appeared in the Leicester Herald, an English provincial paper, under the title of ‘The Dutch Mail,’ with the announcement that it had arrived too late for translation, and so had been set up and printed in the original. Much attention was attracted to the article, and many Dutch scholars rushed into print to say that it was not in any dialect with which they were acquainted. Finally it was discovered to be a hoax. Sir Richard Phillips, the editor of the paper, recently told this story of how the jest was conceived and carried out: ‘One evening, before one of our publications, my men and a boy overturned two or three columns of the paper in type. We had to get ready someway for the coaches, which, at four in the morning, required four or five hundred papers. After every exertion, we were short nearly a column, but there stood a tempting column of ‘pi’ [a jumble of odd letters] on the galleys. It suddenly struck me that this might be thought Dutch. I made up the column, overcame the scruples of the foreman, and so away the country edition went with its philological puzzle to worry the honest agricultural readers’ heads. There was plenty of time to set up a column of plain English for the local edition.’ Sir Richard met one man in Nottingham who for thirty years preserved a copy of the Leicester Herald hoping that some day the letter would be explained.

— Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, September 1888

| Hoaxes

“Our Traveller”

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Johan_Christian_Claussen_Dahl_001.jpg

If thou would’st stand on Etna’s burning brow,
With smoke above, and roaring flame below;
And gaze adown that molten gulf reveal’d,
Till thy soul shudder’d and thy senses reel’d:
If thou wouldst beard Niag’ra in his pride,
Or stem the billows of Propontic tide;
Scale all alone some dizzy Alpine haut,
And shriek “Excelsior!” among the snow:
Wouldst tempt all deaths, all dangers that may be–
Perils by land, and perils on the sea;
This vast round world, I say, if thou would’st view it–
Then, why the dickens don’t you go and do it?

— Henry Cholmondeley-Pennell, Puck on Pegasus, 1861

| Poems

Backdoor Immortality

http://books.google.com/books?id=LkkEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA86&dq=irving+sindler&as_brr=3&ei=hnNWS9-xKKC4yASW2YSjBg&cd=2#v=onepage&q=irving%20sindler&f=false

Irving Sindler was never an actor, but he found another way to star in the movies. As a property master at Sam Goldwyn’s studio, Sindler resolved to get his name onto the screen with every film he worked on. He started in 1925 by painting it on a warehouse in Little Annie Roony, and in further projects he began slipping it artfully onto bottle labels, handbills, store signs, and factory facades. He even convinced his Chinese laundryman to translate it for Marco Polo.

Above, he invented the Sindler & Son Transfer Co. to decorate a truck in The Restless Age — and for Wuthering Heights he wrote his own epitaph.

| Entertainment

Small Talk

A gentleman sitting in one of the boxes in company with the late Lord North, not knowing his lordship, entered into conversation with him, and, seeing two ladies come into an opposite box, turned to him, and addressed him with, ‘Pray, sir, can you inform me who is that ugly woman that is just come in?’ ‘O,’ replied his lordship, with great good humor, ‘that is my wife.’ ‘Sir, I ask you ten thousand pardons; I do not mean her, I mean that shocking monster who is along with her.’ ‘That,’ replied his lordship, ‘is my daughter.’

— M. Lafayette Byrn, The Repository of Wit and Humor, 1853

| Society

A Slap From Poseidon

In the Marine Observer (55:203), T. Wilson Cameron reports one ship’s alarming encounter off the coast of Spain in the 1960s. At 5:20 a.m. one morning the moon disappeared:

I looked to port to see what type of cloud could obscure the moon so thoroughly, and was amazed — horrified, rather, to discover it was no cloud, but an immense wave approaching on our port beam. It stretched far north and south, had no crest, nor white streaks, and as it neared at quite a speed, I could see its front was nearly vertical. I yelled to the lookout man to come into the wheelhouse as he was on the starboard side of the bridge and could not see the wave.

As near as I could judge, about 80 to 100 yards away the wave started to break, and in another few seconds reached our ship and struck us fair abeam with three distinct separate shocks, sweeping our ship for her full length. Fortunately, the vessel rolled away just before the impact and this I am sure saved us from even more serious damage.

“The wave was higher than our foremost track — 85 ft above the water. As this wave approached from a direction 90 degrees different from the normal sea and wind, which had been northerly for a few days previously, I put its existence down to a submarine earthquake in the mid-Atlantic ridge. Certainly it appeared so much different from the normal wind-generated sea, of which I have seen thousands. There was no crest, nor white streaks, a nearly vertical front and quite fast approach.”

| Oddities

King Hunt

Late in 1912, a 26-year-old German named Edward Lasker made his first trip to London. Still a bit seasick from a rough channel crossing, he made his way to the local chess club, as was his custom whenever he visited a new country. He spoke no English, but one of the members invited him to a game. Lasker took white, and they started innocently enough:

1. d4 e6 2. Nf3 f5 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. Bg5 Be7 5. Bxf6 Bxf6 6. e4 fxe4 7. Nxe4 b6 8. Ne5 O-O 9. Bd3 Bb7 10. Qh5 Qe7

lasker-thomas, position before combination

But here the young German saw a remarkable opportunity, an eight-move combination that produced one of the most striking endings in chess history:

11. Qxh7+! Kxh7 12. Nxf6+ Kh6 13. Neg4+ Kg5 14. h4+ Kf4 15. g3+ Kf3 16. Be2+ Kg2 17. Rh2+ Kg1 18. Kd2#

lasker-thomas, final position

Or 18. O-O-O#! “This was very nice,” said his opponent, who turned out to be Sir George Thomas, president of the club and later British champion. In after years Lasker would remember his effort modestly as “the most beautiful game I ever succeeded in winning,” but Mikhail Botvinnik was more forthcoming: “If Edward Lasker had played only one game in his entire life,” he wrote, “this would have been enough to preserve his name in the annals of time.”

| Entertainment