For whomever might be interested in anectodes about mathematicians' personal lives:
My girlfriend's family was related to https://planetmath.org/kallevaisala and she told me this story which was part of the family lore. The family and friends were having some kind of get-together celebration maybe a wedding or so and prof. Vaisala's wife had bought him a brand new suit to look good for the occasion.
During the party they were playing croquet in the garden and prof. Vaisala got really into the game, but had the realization that suit-pants may not be the best for playing croquet. He could have stuffed the end of his pant-legs into his socks but that didn't really work, maybe socks were too tight and pants too big. So, he found a pair of scissors somewhere, and cut his pant-legs short. His wife started crying. She didn't really appreciate the genius of mathematicians.
All of the mathematicians I’ve known ARE weird - really into technicalities and finding loopholes.
But for some of them (particularly undergrad math majors)… I think the weirdness is a bit of an affectation that they adopt having heard so many stories about oddball geniuses. They fear that if they were able to behave and relate to normal people it proves that they lack the otherworldly genius they want to be know for.
Two physicists I think it was Bohr and Heisenberg were traveling on a train in Scotland together. Bohr looked out the train-window and said: Hey Heisenberg, look at those lambs!
Heisenberg replied: What about them?
Bohr: They are all black. Isn't that a big coincidence?
Heisenberg: Yes. At least this side of them.
I may have forgotten who this anecdote was really about, but is one story about how strange those guys can be. :-)
Reminds me of the story about Weiner, who forgot he moved.
Apparently a true story, but the version where he also didn’t recognize his daughter (waiting for him at his previous home to show him to the new one) was an embellishment; at his funeral, his daughter said “dad never forgot who his children were”.
'What also surprised me in the biography was the striking difference between Jews in Italy and in Poland. [...] Leopold Infeld’s autobiography [...] describes the Jewish ghettos in Poland as being almost completely isolated from the general population. [...] She was utterly surprised when she first saw the Jewish quarter in Warsaw, remarking: “The Jews in side curls and kaftans made me feel that I was living in two different nations.'
I wonder if she was failing to distinguish between various kinds of Jews. Compare the majority of American Jews today, and the Hasidic Jews of Brooklyn, for example. This, too, was the case in Poland, home to the vast majority of the world's Jews at the time. On the one hand, there were a number of assimilated Jews and Poles of Jewish ancestry (like Tarski, Brzechwa Steinhaus, and so on). On the other, there were plenty of religious Jews of a more orthodox strain. And given that 1/3 of the population of Warsaw was Jewish, it would be difficult to imagine otherwise.
Part of my ancestry is European Jewish and I'm sure my grandparents and great grandparents would have stories to tell but I was never interested in this while they were still alive. Kind of funny how that works. They were not religious.
Hasidic teaching stories are charming. Here is one:
When Rabbi Zusha was on his deathbed, his students found him in great distress. They tried to comfort him by telling him that he was almost as wise as Moses, so he was sure to be judged positively in Heaven. He replied, "When I pass from this world and appear before the Heavenly Tribunal, they won't ask me, 'Zusha, why weren't you as wise as Moses?' They will ask me, 'Zusha, why weren't you Zusha?'"
I talked to one of Zariski's students about this... He mention to me that the article said he studied ”real” algebraic geometry, which is a different subject —he studied “complex” algebraic geometry as well as algebraic geometry without a limiting adjective.
> On the day he and his fiancée Yole were getting married, with Yole already dressed in white and veiled and the rabbi standing by, the bridegroom was nowhere to be found. It turned out he was working on a mathematical problem. Luckily, Yole was neither angry nor surprised; she was amused. Ha! I need to tell this to my wife.
Fellas and ladies, get yourself a spouse who understands when you're late to your own wedding because you are inspired by your passions.
And then we have the epic years in the 1920's of famine from screwing up the agricultural system, and selectively choosing ethic groups to take food from, the dwarf the famine deaths under the czars.
Any revolution and revolutionary change will cause a considerable amount of deaths during the power struggle. Do this mean that post-revolutionary France is orders of magnitude worse than pre-revolutionary France?
Russia during the czarist era suffered severe famines about one each 11 years, and the death toll was on the order of millions, all happening while Russia exported grains [1]. It could be argued that the modernization happened in the post-revolutionary Russia prevented new famines after some time, despite the initial drawbacks caused by revolutionary changes. It would be very difficult to do a proper land reform with a regime backed by a rural nobility.
> Any revolution and revolutionary change will cause a considerable amount of deaths during the power struggle. Do this mean that post-revolutionary France is orders of magnitude worse than pre-revolutionary France?
Post-revolutionary France was Napoleon causing somewhere between 3.25 million and 6.5 million deaths across Europe. Then back to the monarchy, so very little net change from pre-revolutionary France, except for all the dead bodies.
But I agree with your first sentence. Any real revolution will cause a great deal of death. Can you build back something enough better to be worth all that? For many revolutions, the answer is no.
Basic quality of life went up fast, going from feudal agriculture to an industrial society. But then it stalled. And the process killed literally millions -- some from outright murder, some from overwhelming mismanagement.
Many never wanted the Tsars gone to begin with; agricultural societies can be very conservative. And things had been slowly improving under the monarchy, under the same pressures that modernized western Europe in the mid 19th century. Historians cite a lot of mistakes by that last Tsar that could easily have gone the other way and saved the institution. He really screwed it up after a few generations of improvements.
Historians describe that Russian peasants pre-1917 were basically living in Medieval conditions. Russia didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1918! As flawed as Communism is, it did lurch Russians into the 20th century.
The Tsar and the aristocracy failed at their job. They deserved their fate, to be fired. Maybe Communism was the only way to drag Russian society, kicking and screaming, into the modern era that other European nations had attained, centuries earlier.
Unfortunately, Communism does not have the checks and balances of Capitalism, and it lends itself to abuse by tyrants and dictators.
A NASA saying; “there is no situation so bad that it cannot possibly be made worse”
Which I think applies to people who think communism will somehow save them from their predicaments.
Communism has that special something that destroys the soul. It’s hard to describe if you haven’t seen it or talked to those who have lived it. The attempt at the impossible in creating the ‘new man’ free of greed in combination with a secret police that pits friends against friends, family member against family member such that all personal relationships are voided.
I get that our current system of ‘capitalism’ is more of an oligarchical corporatism than ‘true capitalism’ and is really failing people. But communism is not the answer because it’ll be the same oligarchs in charge and there will be far fewer ways to escape them. I understand that ‘true communism’ would obviate the need for greed and corruption but in trying to get there from here by crossing a river of blood in an continuous revolution it’s far more likely to get stuck in the corrupt communism state which is far worse than our current corrupt capitalism state.
> Historians describe that Russian peasants pre-1917 were basically living in Medieval conditions
FWIW, communism actually forced Russian peasants back into Medieval conditions: first by punishing former peasants who became landowners (so called kulaks), who were declared as class enemies and persecuted. And later by forming Kolkhozes (collective farms), which were not that different from serfdom: children born by members of Klokhoz were forced to work in Kolkhoz too, members had to work state-owned land for free or for minimal amount of sustenance (about a pound of grain per day), and de facto were not allowed to legally leave.
> Maybe Communism was the only way to drag Russian society, kicking and screaming, into the modern era that other European nations had attained, centuries earlier.
It wasn't. Stolypin reforms implemented from 1906 through 1914 aimed at making peasants landowners was a better way.
Russia was of course incredibly backwards by European standards, but in the run-up to WW1 it was industrializing rapidly. Part of German strategic calculation was that if they waited too much longer after 1914 to fight a war with a modernizing Russia that they would lose.
Plus, it wasn't even the Communists who deposed the Czar. He was already gone after the February Revolution, 7 months before. The main contribution of the Communists to the cause was to spend the next two decades committing mass murder and achieving mass starvation.
One thing that puzzles me is those people who shudder at comparing Stalin's murderous spree with what Hitler's effects were. Is it the cognitive dissonance of not wanting to believe that we not only allied with a genocidal dictatorship but heavily supplied them with industrial output during the war? My family lived in the USSR and I can say for a fact - knowing it was the NKVD rather than Gestapo that might knock on the door in the middle of the night to disappear your father or uncle was of little consolation.
Most people don’t know that Lenin was sent to Russia from his Swiss exile by the Germans in a sealed diplomatic train with the express intent to induce the October revolution and end the hostilities on that front. It was done to the Russians by cynical Germans who still ended up losing WWI.
Churchill deliberately courted the Russians and prevented attacks on them early on in WWII to make it easier for them to switch sides, a very successful tactic which won WWII at the cost of Russian lives.
I’m one of those people who see China as a bigger threat to western hegemony and instead of using Ukraine to give Russia a bloody nose we should have again fermented divisions between Russia and China. It would have been possible to admit Russia into NATO, I know it sounds ridiculous but Switzerland was formed out of a having the bully canton join the alliance of smaller cantons that was expressly formed to defend against it. It can be done and there was historical precedent. Not anymore, China and Russia are now so joined at the hip they might as well be considered a single entity. I think the west overestimated its strength, and even now with the posturing for WWIII with fancy and expensive weapons it appears that the West doesn’t understand that warfare has forever changed. I did hope the Houthi conflict would have woken people up to that reality but somehow we’re holding on to this notion that a WWIII is winnable.
I should note that I lament the cost of these conflicts to human lives on both sides and wish smarter populations governed by astute politicians would have found ways to successfully avoid war, perhaps at the cost of a multipolar world which we’re likely to get anyway. I much prefer the Chinese way of fighting with ‘high tech overproduction’ and wish we could ‘fight back’ with our own overproduction. We would all be far wealthier for it, especially since the alternative is massively destructive.
China no longer sees Russia as a partner, but a vassal state. They rejected Putin's proposal for the Siberian pipeline and are slowing down deliveries of various components needed to manufacture weapons. Chinese banks are limiting their dealing with Russian banks and companies to avoid sanctions. Like it or hate it, US Dollar is the world's reserve currency and getting cut off from the global banking network is not worth all the gold that Putin can offer. China doesn't want Russia to attack other countries, because like a wise drug dealer, it does not want to loose its customers. Russia is killing them and that messes with China's business. To be honest if China could capture Putin and give him to the West in a box with a red ribbon it would. They saw how weak he is and have no respect for him.
On top of that, China has its own problems--demographic and economic. Russia cannot help China solve them so China is happy to see Russia bleed and slowly descend into the inevitable chaos once the Russian economy collapses. Xi will be happy to carve out a part of Russia for himself once an opportunity presents itself. Although how much more of a really backwards population and barren land he needs is a open question.
You make it sound like Germany weaponised an oblivious Lenin by letting him loose on Russia. In reality, Lenin observed the February revolution from afar and realized it was a critical time to rejoin the struggle, and petitioned the German government to leave; the Germans agreed because it was strategically advantageous for them to allow dissidents to travel into Russia. The so-called "sealed" train was a cover story [1].
Churchill was too late "Its (Munichs appeasement) reverse side was an unwillingness to cooperate with the USSR against Nazi Germany"
They prefered Hitler to Stalin.
"Winston Churchill, then a backbench Tory MP, insisted that without an alliance with the USSR, France and Britain could not help their allies or would-be allies in Eastern Europe"
Instead of using Ukraine to give Russia a bloody nose we should have again fermented divisions between Russia and China.
Your reading of what's driving Western support for Ukraine is completely wrong here. They're not simply doing it to "give Russia a bloody nose" for its own sake. They certainly don't mind if that's what Russia gets out of it. But that's not the key objective in itself.
On the flip side: "fermenting divisions between Russia and China" is just fantasy, as at the moment U.S. is really quite inept in regard to such influence. It has no clue how to do that effectively (and any efforts it did take in that direction would most likely be moot and/or backfire).
I should note that I lament the cost of these conflicts to human lives on both sides and wish smarter populations governed by astute politicians would have found ways to successfully avoid war, perhaps at the cost of a multipolar world which we’re likely to get anyway.
Okay, multipolar world, whatever.
But what it really comes down to is this: the only way to have "avoided war" (after 2014) would have been to simply give Russia what it wanted -- recognized sovereignty over significant chunks of territory (most likely at least as much as it's sitting on now), combined with permanent limits on Ukraine's own sovereignty (in terms of its ability to enter treaties).
If you think this would have been (or still would be) an astute course of action -- you might as well come out an say so.
I think peace could have been bought at the cost of neutrality, so sovereignty yes. I’m sure Ukraine would have been far better off with that, and there are many hundred of thousands of men who definitely would be.
It is hard to discuss this with people because it appears to me that most people are divorced from reality of the war. The framing of it has been warped and anyone who strays from the NAFO line is somehow an apologist. I hate this war and I hate the wars that it seems we’re on the precipice of starting with China and Iran and world will be much worse off when that happens.
I think peace could have been bought at the cost of neutrality, so sovereignty yes.
It's possible of course, but it's also speculative, and the window for that option is long since closed -- once Putin grabbed the Crimea and then the LNR/DNR, the "neutrality" bid fell from the table.
In any case he's been quite consistent about maintaining whatever regions he's currently occupying (and likely then some, according to the most recent formulations).
So if we're to buy peace now by just giving him what he wants -- that (or some approximation thereof) is what he'll be demanding. In any case it seems extremely unlikely he'd accept a neutrality-only bid by this point.
* once Putin grabbed the Crimea and then the LNR/DNR, the "neutrality" bid fell from the table
For a while it looked like Ukraine was turning the tide and they were told then not to negotiate for peace because they didn't have to - wait for an even better negotiating position. So they're told don't negotiate when you're loosing and don't negotiate when you're winning which approximate boils down to don't negotiate. Many things are possible when the alternative is losing a hugely destructive war. I.e. these things were and still remain on the table. Sure, Ukraine's not getting their land back unless they win the war but how likely is that to happen anyway.
Knowing Ukraine before the war there was already a huge Ukraine vs Russia ethnic divide that was being made worse by the Ukrainian government passing anti-Russian laws. I see Putins objectives as bringing ethnic Russians back into the fold and establishing a buffer zone. I think if a real Russia-NATO conflict broke out Russia out of necessity would turn to nukes pretty quickly - so I see this Russia-Ukraine war as less of a war of a conquest and more of a way to avoid nuking their Russian Ukrainian cousins if a full scale Russia-NATO war was to break out. They would have less qualms nuking West Ukraine as there are fewer cousins in the west so that would be free to be part of NATO.
There is the premise that Russia would not honor such an agreement of neutrality and I don't agree with that premise for a raft of reasons. If the premise that an embolden Putin will go on a concurring rampage I would have to disagree with that as well for another raft of reasons.
I don't have time to go into the whole history of it now - but I think an outcome where Ukraine splits in two where West Ukraine is a neutralized entity or absorbed into their surrounding NATO countries would have been and is still possible. Yes that would mean NATO on Russia's boarder but there is already a huge NATO boarder on Russia - that wasn't the problem.
I was looking to move to Ukraine in 2020 because I think it's a lovely country and Lviv is a lovely city. Very cheap where I could exist cheaply and spend my time reading books. It's a very corrupt country which does keep prices down but makes business difficult - but since my source of money is foreign I could effectively hide my wealth and avoid attracting attention. I decided against it because I did expect this war to break out as people were not taking Russia's warnings seriously. They had a lot of 'fixer-upper' housing that looked like they were already bombed, the housing was cheap but the problem is if you turn up with a bunch of money to fix the housing you're going catch the attention of the corrupt mobsters. I think Lviv would be an even nicer city if governed by Poland as it has been before in the not so distant past.
The impression I have is that right now, this war is seen as existential for both Russia, Ukraine, and several EU states.
For Ukraine, they need to win by such a severe margin that Russia doesn't even think to lick its wounds, rebuild its strength, and try again.
For Russia… well, it's really about Putin. And he dares not show any sign of weakness, which would include ceding the "loss" of the territory which he has officially claimed to recognise as part of Russia.
The EU has several ex-Soviet and ex-Warsaw-pact states which openly regard a Russian victory to be an existential threat (as in "we're next"); this would remain the case regardless of what happens with NATO. But NATO does also exist, and even if the USA leaves the UK has a significant arms industry that would come in addition to that of also-EU members like France.
I don't think China cares beyond the degree to which it might take focus away from whatever it is they want to do. They seem to be quite content to rapidly ramp up their industrial capacity and general economic output, be the world's factory and hypermarket.
The west collectively is, I think, worried about escalation precisely because of the nuclear option. Our leaders want Russia to leave Ukraine in peace and recognise its sovereignty, while also itself remaining stable as it does so… which I don't think is possible, but I'd like it to be (and what do I know anyway, I'm software engineering, not international geopolitics).
Personally I suspect that the Russia nuclear arsenal is in a bad state: the main armed forces at the start of the invasion were terrible because they weren't expecting to not need to have to do more than show up, and similar logic applies to nukes.
But!
1) One small nuke is enough for a high-altitude EMP to cause severe issues.
2) I wouldn't want to risk an entire country on a dice roll.
And they were told then not to negotiate for peace because they didn't have to
This is a rather condescending attitude which assumes the Ukrainians have no agency over their situation, and are just doing what their Western puppet masters tell them to do.
I was looking to move to Ukraine in 2020 because I think it's a lovely country and Lviv is a lovely city. Very cheap where I could exist cheaply and spend my time reading books. BTW it'd be an even nicer city if it were governed by Poland.
Please don't, as you plainly don't respect the country or the people living there.
If you'd prefer to live under Polish administration, try Wrocław.
It’s not condescending it’s reality, and they’re now dealing with the consequences of that reality. What is that leftist refrain, ‘freedom of speech not freedom from consequences’. They’re exercising their sovereignty which is their right, I think better choices could have been made but that’s just my opinion.
In life we must deal with reality, the strong do what they can and the weak endure what they must. Most of us don’t get to live life from a constant position of strength and must be able to negotiate from a position of weakness which involves picking the least bad choices. The West has enjoyed an extended period of being able to negotiate from a position of strength and unfortunately the West isn’t strong enough to keep things that way. Weakness is dangerous, I wish the West was stronger, but I must deal with reality.
Sounds more like you're (uncritically) accepting the narratives put out by various sources in regard to events of the time.
I think better choices could have been made
That's very different from what you said initially.
You didn't say that the Ukrainians "decided" not to negotiate for a cease fire (meaning, to accept Putin's demands for recognized sovereignty over the occupied regions).
What you said (twice, for emphasis) was that they "were told not to".
As if they are simply incapable of making such decisions for themselves, and just do what their Western handlers tell them to do.
The west does have a huge amount of say over Ukraine policy, the extent at which they can continue the war is completely down to western support. Without western support they would have had to either negotiate or surrender by now. Being told not to negotiate comes with the promise of support if they chose not to negotiate and Ukraine has chosen to take the West up on that promise. I’m not saying it wasn’t Ukraines choice to make. But there is no reality where Ukraine wins this war on their own without western support so this idea that they alone can chose their fate is ridiculous especially when that determination is currently being made on the battle field.
Should have followed Patton's desire to make sure the Russians had no part in Europe outside of Russia. I guess cold pragmatism aligned us with Stalin to defeat Germany.
"The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less." (Schlock Mercenary Maxim #29)
It was mutual, by the way. Stalin (or one of his generals?) said "even with the devil you may walk to the end of the bridge". That is, to them the west was the devil, and they were using the west just like the west was using them.
I like the post, and I would upvote it if the title was more descriptive of the actual content instead of a clickbait-y "hook" that hints nothing about the topic.
I thought I'd be reading about an interesting neuroscience case (or whatever), but it's a review/short synopsis of a mathematician's biography. The wedding anecdote is just the last paragraph.
The story about the wedding is one short paragraph at the end - with almost no extra information and not referenced elsewhere in the article. Very anticlimactic.
> But the story in the book that I liked the most is this one: Zariski was, of course, very much obsessed with mathematics. On the day he and his fiancée Yole were getting married, with Yole already dressed in white and veiled and the rabbi standing by, the bridegroom was nowhere to be found. It turned out he was working on a mathematical problem. Luckily, Yole was neither angry nor surprised; she was amused. Ha! I need to tell this to my wife.
Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is" to quote Ian Banks' "Excession". It's also helpful to characterize a person not just by their character, tenacity or energy, or age, but also a number between 0 and 1 that indicates how much of their time they've spent in the real world, vs in their happy fun space. Call it the "imagination factor". A bright, capable mind of 40 with an imagination factor of .75 may only have the cumulative real-world experience of a 10-year-old.
It's unclear to me what you're defining as real. Coal mining? Childcare? Community centers? Through hiking? Interesting theoretical realms can have enormous consequences in the physical/tangible world, as I'm sure you know :). Maybe it's more of a "presence factor" in relation to this story: a measure of how aware you are of the roles and responsibilities you have and how engaged with them you are.
I make no value judgement here. I thought the OP's post was interesting as an example of how humans can mediate their own "VR" experience, and have done so for all of human history. The "absent-minded professor" is a stereotype for a reason. It can be disconcerting for someone with high imagination factor to interact with someone with an imagination factor of 0, even if all other qualities (age, culture, language, etc) are the same, since the paths they have both walked are so very different. The error modes that arise from impedance mismatch go in both directions. It's not clear what nature will select for. Certainly over short periods of time, nature has selected for heavy abstraction and all the military/economic power it yields. The longer time frame has not yet played out.
The path everyone has walked is different from everyone else. You seem to be trying to reduce it to a formula, coin new terms, and literally apply numeric values to people. I don't think anyone is that simple in reality.
If you have struggled to interact with people who are different than you, that is also part of the human experience, not something we need to devise measurements for.
Your strawman assumes a reductive user who will replace a person with a number. This of course happens in real life, with IQ, Meyers-Briggs, and so on. This is wrong. It is a kind of wrongness exemplified by "Animal Farm", the nuanced ideals of revolution that eventually reduce to "4 legs good; 2 legs bad".
IF is a tool mostly to remind high IF people to cherish the value of both real and imaginary experience, and a tool to help people who dwell mostly in either realm to respect each other. If a high IF person forgets to respect the real, he's liable to forget his wedding. If a low IF person forgets, he's liable to miss out on the wonder and value of abstract thought.
> A bright, capable mind of 40 with an imagination factor of .75 may only have the cumulative real-world experience of a 10-year-old.
While provocative, that argument does not take into account the development of the brain. Processing early experiences are far different from the ones when the brain is fully developed. This includes the storage of memories (knowledge).
The fact that our identities are a path integral through a unique 4 dimensional spacetime curve does not undermine the utility of first-order characterizations of the resulting value. We do it all the time: where are you from? When were you born? What did you study? What's your favorite ice cream flavor? I am simply adding, and characterizing, an additional factor: how often do you dream? None of the answers to these questions tell the whole story of a person, but they are useful nevertheless.
You take a strange lesson from an anecdote about artificial super-intelligences. In the book, the AIs can spend time in a limitless virtual universe, better than reality.
Time spent in "infinite fun" (as they call it) has no value because it has no impact on what happens in the real world, hence the importance of remembering where the off-switch is. It's about having an effect on the world, not the world having an effect on you.
Someone who spends a lot of time (and in all likelihood is wired to spend a lot of time) thinking about their work is not wasting their time; they are preparing to have an effect on the world.
Where did you see a value judgment? The imagination factor is a trade-off, neither good nor bad in itself. It's normally distributed, and selection pressure will push the median up or down. The utility of the concept comes in personal interaction - those with high IF speaking with low IF people should respect the value of (perhaps multiples) of real-world experience that they have. In effect, the concept of IF is a tool of both humility and empathy.
> Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is"
If this world is a simulation, and someone among us is the player-character, forgetting that there is an off switch is a feature for them that increases immersion by making any failure to suspend disbelief (which I as a probable NPC suffer from regulary) a moot issue. As long as we think that this is reality, its believability is subordinate to its survivability.
If this world is a simulation knowing the nature might let us work with it better. Hacking the universe (maybe or maybe not if a simulation). It would in some ways just become an extension of physics (in effect).
This gives me an opportunity to bring up a favorite story of mine.
This seems to be one of those non-converging title sequences because no option satisfies everyone.
We eventually changed it to "Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry", even though this omits the anecdote which the thread is mostly about. People won't miss that if they see the article's own title though.
And in this case, it seems misleading and definitely clickbait. The quote at the end doesn't support the claim that he forgot anything.
The citation (https://books.google.com/books?id=9zu0BQAAQBAJ&pg=PA33&lpg=P... ) doesn't support the claim either. It sounds more like the story was: While waiting for his wife to arrive at their wedding ceremony, he stepped away and passed the time by working on a problem.
Oscar Zariski - forgot about his own wedding is the original title on the article.
The title I objected to was "A man who forgot about his own wedding". This title was actually edited to make it more clickbaity before it was later edited to be less clickbaity.
These anecdotes not only humanize these brilliant minds but also offer a humorous and endearing look at the quirks that often accompany such intense intellectual focus.
For whomever might be interested in anectodes about mathematicians' personal lives:
My girlfriend's family was related to https://planetmath.org/kallevaisala and she told me this story which was part of the family lore. The family and friends were having some kind of get-together celebration maybe a wedding or so and prof. Vaisala's wife had bought him a brand new suit to look good for the occasion.
During the party they were playing croquet in the garden and prof. Vaisala got really into the game, but had the realization that suit-pants may not be the best for playing croquet. He could have stuffed the end of his pant-legs into his socks but that didn't really work, maybe socks were too tight and pants too big. So, he found a pair of scissors somewhere, and cut his pant-legs short. His wife started crying. She didn't really appreciate the genius of mathematicians.
Im always conflicted about stories like these.
All of the mathematicians I’ve known ARE weird - really into technicalities and finding loopholes.
But for some of them (particularly undergrad math majors)… I think the weirdness is a bit of an affectation that they adopt having heard so many stories about oddball geniuses. They fear that if they were able to behave and relate to normal people it proves that they lack the otherworldly genius they want to be know for.
Let’s also normalize genius being normal people
Two physicists I think it was Bohr and Heisenberg were traveling on a train in Scotland together. Bohr looked out the train-window and said: Hey Heisenberg, look at those lambs!
Heisenberg replied: What about them?
Bohr: They are all black. Isn't that a big coincidence?
Heisenberg: Yes. At least this side of them.
I may have forgotten who this anecdote was really about, but is one story about how strange those guys can be. :-)
Thank you for sharing this story! The story brought a smile on my face. Needed it today.
Thanks
Reminds me of the story about Weiner, who forgot he moved.
Apparently a true story, but the version where he also didn’t recognize his daughter (waiting for him at his previous home to show him to the new one) was an embellishment; at his funeral, his daughter said “dad never forgot who his children were”.
I think such anecdotes and concepts reflect the complexity of human nature
Historical footnote:
'What also surprised me in the biography was the striking difference between Jews in Italy and in Poland. [...] Leopold Infeld’s autobiography [...] describes the Jewish ghettos in Poland as being almost completely isolated from the general population. [...] She was utterly surprised when she first saw the Jewish quarter in Warsaw, remarking: “The Jews in side curls and kaftans made me feel that I was living in two different nations.'
I wonder if she was failing to distinguish between various kinds of Jews. Compare the majority of American Jews today, and the Hasidic Jews of Brooklyn, for example. This, too, was the case in Poland, home to the vast majority of the world's Jews at the time. On the one hand, there were a number of assimilated Jews and Poles of Jewish ancestry (like Tarski, Brzechwa Steinhaus, and so on). On the other, there were plenty of religious Jews of a more orthodox strain. And given that 1/3 of the population of Warsaw was Jewish, it would be difficult to imagine otherwise.
I would guess to some extent?
I am far from an expert but I don't think late 19th century or early 20th century Europe would be directly comparable to 21st century USA. It's an interesting topic and maybe some starting points are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_secularism https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-pop... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtetl
Part of my ancestry is European Jewish and I'm sure my grandparents and great grandparents would have stories to tell but I was never interested in this while they were still alive. Kind of funny how that works. They were not religious.
She was likely seeing Hasidic Jews, who are quite distinct in the way they live and dress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasidic_Judaism
Hasidic teaching stories are charming. Here is one:
When Rabbi Zusha was on his deathbed, his students found him in great distress. They tried to comfort him by telling him that he was almost as wise as Moses, so he was sure to be judged positively in Heaven. He replied, "When I pass from this world and appear before the Heavenly Tribunal, they won't ask me, 'Zusha, why weren't you as wise as Moses?' They will ask me, 'Zusha, why weren't you Zusha?'"
I talked to one of Zariski's students about this... He mention to me that the article said he studied ”real” algebraic geometry, which is a different subject —he studied “complex” algebraic geometry as well as algebraic geometry without a limiting adjective.
> On the day he and his fiancée Yole were getting married, with Yole already dressed in white and veiled and the rabbi standing by, the bridegroom was nowhere to be found. It turned out he was working on a mathematical problem. Luckily, Yole was neither angry nor surprised; she was amused. Ha! I need to tell this to my wife.
Fellas and ladies, get yourself a spouse who understands when you're late to your own wedding because you are inspired by your passions.
Nice little story, the bride was not upset. But a interesting read.
Now I'm curious: most of us are familiar with what the USSR did wrong, were they better or worse than the Tsars before them?
The early USSR was at least two orders of magnitude worse than the czars, if you score either by yearly executions or by yearly sent to Siberia.
And that's not evening counting the USSR's millions "resettled" in ethic operations, with about a 20%-25% death rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...
And then we have the epic years in the 1920's of famine from screwing up the agricultural system, and selectively choosing ethic groups to take food from, the dwarf the famine deaths under the czars.
Any revolution and revolutionary change will cause a considerable amount of deaths during the power struggle. Do this mean that post-revolutionary France is orders of magnitude worse than pre-revolutionary France?
Russia during the czarist era suffered severe famines about one each 11 years, and the death toll was on the order of millions, all happening while Russia exported grains [1]. It could be argued that the modernization happened in the post-revolutionary Russia prevented new famines after some time, despite the initial drawbacks caused by revolutionary changes. It would be very difficult to do a proper land reform with a regime backed by a rural nobility.
[1] http://www.domarchive.ru/history/part-1-empire/61
> Any revolution and revolutionary change will cause a considerable amount of deaths during the power struggle. Do this mean that post-revolutionary France is orders of magnitude worse than pre-revolutionary France?
Post-revolutionary France was Napoleon causing somewhere between 3.25 million and 6.5 million deaths across Europe. Then back to the monarchy, so very little net change from pre-revolutionary France, except for all the dead bodies.
But I agree with your first sentence. Any real revolution will cause a great deal of death. Can you build back something enough better to be worth all that? For many revolutions, the answer is no.
It kinda depends on how you measure.
Basic quality of life went up fast, going from feudal agriculture to an industrial society. But then it stalled. And the process killed literally millions -- some from outright murder, some from overwhelming mismanagement.
Many never wanted the Tsars gone to begin with; agricultural societies can be very conservative. And things had been slowly improving under the monarchy, under the same pressures that modernized western Europe in the mid 19th century. Historians cite a lot of mistakes by that last Tsar that could easily have gone the other way and saved the institution. He really screwed it up after a few generations of improvements.
So... depends.
Historians describe that Russian peasants pre-1917 were basically living in Medieval conditions. Russia didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1918! As flawed as Communism is, it did lurch Russians into the 20th century.
The Tsar and the aristocracy failed at their job. They deserved their fate, to be fired. Maybe Communism was the only way to drag Russian society, kicking and screaming, into the modern era that other European nations had attained, centuries earlier.
Unfortunately, Communism does not have the checks and balances of Capitalism, and it lends itself to abuse by tyrants and dictators.
A NASA saying; “there is no situation so bad that it cannot possibly be made worse”
Which I think applies to people who think communism will somehow save them from their predicaments.
Communism has that special something that destroys the soul. It’s hard to describe if you haven’t seen it or talked to those who have lived it. The attempt at the impossible in creating the ‘new man’ free of greed in combination with a secret police that pits friends against friends, family member against family member such that all personal relationships are voided.
I get that our current system of ‘capitalism’ is more of an oligarchical corporatism than ‘true capitalism’ and is really failing people. But communism is not the answer because it’ll be the same oligarchs in charge and there will be far fewer ways to escape them. I understand that ‘true communism’ would obviate the need for greed and corruption but in trying to get there from here by crossing a river of blood in an continuous revolution it’s far more likely to get stuck in the corrupt communism state which is far worse than our current corrupt capitalism state.
> Historians describe that Russian peasants pre-1917 were basically living in Medieval conditions
FWIW, communism actually forced Russian peasants back into Medieval conditions: first by punishing former peasants who became landowners (so called kulaks), who were declared as class enemies and persecuted. And later by forming Kolkhozes (collective farms), which were not that different from serfdom: children born by members of Klokhoz were forced to work in Kolkhoz too, members had to work state-owned land for free or for minimal amount of sustenance (about a pound of grain per day), and de facto were not allowed to legally leave.
> Maybe Communism was the only way to drag Russian society, kicking and screaming, into the modern era that other European nations had attained, centuries earlier.
It wasn't. Stolypin reforms implemented from 1906 through 1914 aimed at making peasants landowners was a better way.
Russia was of course incredibly backwards by European standards, but in the run-up to WW1 it was industrializing rapidly. Part of German strategic calculation was that if they waited too much longer after 1914 to fight a war with a modernizing Russia that they would lose.
Plus, it wasn't even the Communists who deposed the Czar. He was already gone after the February Revolution, 7 months before. The main contribution of the Communists to the cause was to spend the next two decades committing mass murder and achieving mass starvation.
>to be fired
well that's an understatement
One metric would be body count. 20th century Marxists are somewhere between 60 and 148 million dead. Hard to top that.
One thing that puzzles me is those people who shudder at comparing Stalin's murderous spree with what Hitler's effects were. Is it the cognitive dissonance of not wanting to believe that we not only allied with a genocidal dictatorship but heavily supplied them with industrial output during the war? My family lived in the USSR and I can say for a fact - knowing it was the NKVD rather than Gestapo that might knock on the door in the middle of the night to disappear your father or uncle was of little consolation.
Most people don’t know that Lenin was sent to Russia from his Swiss exile by the Germans in a sealed diplomatic train with the express intent to induce the October revolution and end the hostilities on that front. It was done to the Russians by cynical Germans who still ended up losing WWI.
Churchill deliberately courted the Russians and prevented attacks on them early on in WWII to make it easier for them to switch sides, a very successful tactic which won WWII at the cost of Russian lives.
I’m one of those people who see China as a bigger threat to western hegemony and instead of using Ukraine to give Russia a bloody nose we should have again fermented divisions between Russia and China. It would have been possible to admit Russia into NATO, I know it sounds ridiculous but Switzerland was formed out of a having the bully canton join the alliance of smaller cantons that was expressly formed to defend against it. It can be done and there was historical precedent. Not anymore, China and Russia are now so joined at the hip they might as well be considered a single entity. I think the west overestimated its strength, and even now with the posturing for WWIII with fancy and expensive weapons it appears that the West doesn’t understand that warfare has forever changed. I did hope the Houthi conflict would have woken people up to that reality but somehow we’re holding on to this notion that a WWIII is winnable.
I should note that I lament the cost of these conflicts to human lives on both sides and wish smarter populations governed by astute politicians would have found ways to successfully avoid war, perhaps at the cost of a multipolar world which we’re likely to get anyway. I much prefer the Chinese way of fighting with ‘high tech overproduction’ and wish we could ‘fight back’ with our own overproduction. We would all be far wealthier for it, especially since the alternative is massively destructive.
China no longer sees Russia as a partner, but a vassal state. They rejected Putin's proposal for the Siberian pipeline and are slowing down deliveries of various components needed to manufacture weapons. Chinese banks are limiting their dealing with Russian banks and companies to avoid sanctions. Like it or hate it, US Dollar is the world's reserve currency and getting cut off from the global banking network is not worth all the gold that Putin can offer. China doesn't want Russia to attack other countries, because like a wise drug dealer, it does not want to loose its customers. Russia is killing them and that messes with China's business. To be honest if China could capture Putin and give him to the West in a box with a red ribbon it would. They saw how weak he is and have no respect for him.
On top of that, China has its own problems--demographic and economic. Russia cannot help China solve them so China is happy to see Russia bleed and slowly descend into the inevitable chaos once the Russian economy collapses. Xi will be happy to carve out a part of Russia for himself once an opportunity presents itself. Although how much more of a really backwards population and barren land he needs is a open question.
I don't agree with your assessments but I don't have the time to discuss it on HN. Back to work for me.
You make it sound like Germany weaponised an oblivious Lenin by letting him loose on Russia. In reality, Lenin observed the February revolution from afar and realized it was a critical time to rejoin the struggle, and petitioned the German government to leave; the Germans agreed because it was strategically advantageous for them to allow dissidents to travel into Russia. The so-called "sealed" train was a cover story [1].
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/lenin-and-the...
It'd be more apt to write "fomented divisions", rather than "fermented divisions".
Ah thanks, thats what I meant to write, I think a typo + autocorrect got me there
>Churchill deliberately courted the Russians
Churchill was too late "Its (Munichs appeasement) reverse side was an unwillingness to cooperate with the USSR against Nazi Germany"
They prefered Hitler to Stalin.
"Winston Churchill, then a backbench Tory MP, insisted that without an alliance with the USSR, France and Britain could not help their allies or would-be allies in Eastern Europe"
https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Fiasco_The_Anglo-Franco-...
Instead of using Ukraine to give Russia a bloody nose we should have again fermented divisions between Russia and China.
Your reading of what's driving Western support for Ukraine is completely wrong here. They're not simply doing it to "give Russia a bloody nose" for its own sake. They certainly don't mind if that's what Russia gets out of it. But that's not the key objective in itself.
On the flip side: "fermenting divisions between Russia and China" is just fantasy, as at the moment U.S. is really quite inept in regard to such influence. It has no clue how to do that effectively (and any efforts it did take in that direction would most likely be moot and/or backfire).
I should note that I lament the cost of these conflicts to human lives on both sides and wish smarter populations governed by astute politicians would have found ways to successfully avoid war, perhaps at the cost of a multipolar world which we’re likely to get anyway.
Okay, multipolar world, whatever.
But what it really comes down to is this: the only way to have "avoided war" (after 2014) would have been to simply give Russia what it wanted -- recognized sovereignty over significant chunks of territory (most likely at least as much as it's sitting on now), combined with permanent limits on Ukraine's own sovereignty (in terms of its ability to enter treaties).
If you think this would have been (or still would be) an astute course of action -- you might as well come out an say so.
I think peace could have been bought at the cost of neutrality, so sovereignty yes. I’m sure Ukraine would have been far better off with that, and there are many hundred of thousands of men who definitely would be.
It is hard to discuss this with people because it appears to me that most people are divorced from reality of the war. The framing of it has been warped and anyone who strays from the NAFO line is somehow an apologist. I hate this war and I hate the wars that it seems we’re on the precipice of starting with China and Iran and world will be much worse off when that happens.
I think peace could have been bought at the cost of neutrality, so sovereignty yes.
It's possible of course, but it's also speculative, and the window for that option is long since closed -- once Putin grabbed the Crimea and then the LNR/DNR, the "neutrality" bid fell from the table.
In any case he's been quite consistent about maintaining whatever regions he's currently occupying (and likely then some, according to the most recent formulations).
So if we're to buy peace now by just giving him what he wants -- that (or some approximation thereof) is what he'll be demanding. In any case it seems extremely unlikely he'd accept a neutrality-only bid by this point.
* once Putin grabbed the Crimea and then the LNR/DNR, the "neutrality" bid fell from the table
For a while it looked like Ukraine was turning the tide and they were told then not to negotiate for peace because they didn't have to - wait for an even better negotiating position. So they're told don't negotiate when you're loosing and don't negotiate when you're winning which approximate boils down to don't negotiate. Many things are possible when the alternative is losing a hugely destructive war. I.e. these things were and still remain on the table. Sure, Ukraine's not getting their land back unless they win the war but how likely is that to happen anyway.
Knowing Ukraine before the war there was already a huge Ukraine vs Russia ethnic divide that was being made worse by the Ukrainian government passing anti-Russian laws. I see Putins objectives as bringing ethnic Russians back into the fold and establishing a buffer zone. I think if a real Russia-NATO conflict broke out Russia out of necessity would turn to nukes pretty quickly - so I see this Russia-Ukraine war as less of a war of a conquest and more of a way to avoid nuking their Russian Ukrainian cousins if a full scale Russia-NATO war was to break out. They would have less qualms nuking West Ukraine as there are fewer cousins in the west so that would be free to be part of NATO.
There is the premise that Russia would not honor such an agreement of neutrality and I don't agree with that premise for a raft of reasons. If the premise that an embolden Putin will go on a concurring rampage I would have to disagree with that as well for another raft of reasons.
I don't have time to go into the whole history of it now - but I think an outcome where Ukraine splits in two where West Ukraine is a neutralized entity or absorbed into their surrounding NATO countries would have been and is still possible. Yes that would mean NATO on Russia's boarder but there is already a huge NATO boarder on Russia - that wasn't the problem.
I was looking to move to Ukraine in 2020 because I think it's a lovely country and Lviv is a lovely city. Very cheap where I could exist cheaply and spend my time reading books. It's a very corrupt country which does keep prices down but makes business difficult - but since my source of money is foreign I could effectively hide my wealth and avoid attracting attention. I decided against it because I did expect this war to break out as people were not taking Russia's warnings seriously. They had a lot of 'fixer-upper' housing that looked like they were already bombed, the housing was cheap but the problem is if you turn up with a bunch of money to fix the housing you're going catch the attention of the corrupt mobsters. I think Lviv would be an even nicer city if governed by Poland as it has been before in the not so distant past.
The impression I have is that right now, this war is seen as existential for both Russia, Ukraine, and several EU states.
For Ukraine, they need to win by such a severe margin that Russia doesn't even think to lick its wounds, rebuild its strength, and try again.
For Russia… well, it's really about Putin. And he dares not show any sign of weakness, which would include ceding the "loss" of the territory which he has officially claimed to recognise as part of Russia.
The EU has several ex-Soviet and ex-Warsaw-pact states which openly regard a Russian victory to be an existential threat (as in "we're next"); this would remain the case regardless of what happens with NATO. But NATO does also exist, and even if the USA leaves the UK has a significant arms industry that would come in addition to that of also-EU members like France.
I don't think China cares beyond the degree to which it might take focus away from whatever it is they want to do. They seem to be quite content to rapidly ramp up their industrial capacity and general economic output, be the world's factory and hypermarket.
The west collectively is, I think, worried about escalation precisely because of the nuclear option. Our leaders want Russia to leave Ukraine in peace and recognise its sovereignty, while also itself remaining stable as it does so… which I don't think is possible, but I'd like it to be (and what do I know anyway, I'm software engineering, not international geopolitics).
Personally I suspect that the Russia nuclear arsenal is in a bad state: the main armed forces at the start of the invasion were terrible because they weren't expecting to not need to have to do more than show up, and similar logic applies to nukes.
But!
1) One small nuke is enough for a high-altitude EMP to cause severe issues.
2) I wouldn't want to risk an entire country on a dice roll.
And they were told then not to negotiate for peace because they didn't have to
This is a rather condescending attitude which assumes the Ukrainians have no agency over their situation, and are just doing what their Western puppet masters tell them to do.
I was looking to move to Ukraine in 2020 because I think it's a lovely country and Lviv is a lovely city. Very cheap where I could exist cheaply and spend my time reading books. BTW it'd be an even nicer city if it were governed by Poland.
Please don't, as you plainly don't respect the country or the people living there.
If you'd prefer to live under Polish administration, try Wrocław.
It’s not condescending it’s reality, and they’re now dealing with the consequences of that reality. What is that leftist refrain, ‘freedom of speech not freedom from consequences’. They’re exercising their sovereignty which is their right, I think better choices could have been made but that’s just my opinion.
In life we must deal with reality, the strong do what they can and the weak endure what they must. Most of us don’t get to live life from a constant position of strength and must be able to negotiate from a position of weakness which involves picking the least bad choices. The West has enjoyed an extended period of being able to negotiate from a position of strength and unfortunately the West isn’t strong enough to keep things that way. Weakness is dangerous, I wish the West was stronger, but I must deal with reality.
It’s not condescending it’s reality
Sounds more like you're (uncritically) accepting the narratives put out by various sources in regard to events of the time.
I think better choices could have been made
That's very different from what you said initially.
You didn't say that the Ukrainians "decided" not to negotiate for a cease fire (meaning, to accept Putin's demands for recognized sovereignty over the occupied regions).
What you said (twice, for emphasis) was that they "were told not to".
As if they are simply incapable of making such decisions for themselves, and just do what their Western handlers tell them to do.
The west does have a huge amount of say over Ukraine policy, the extent at which they can continue the war is completely down to western support. Without western support they would have had to either negotiate or surrender by now. Being told not to negotiate comes with the promise of support if they chose not to negotiate and Ukraine has chosen to take the West up on that promise. I’m not saying it wasn’t Ukraines choice to make. But there is no reality where Ukraine wins this war on their own without western support so this idea that they alone can chose their fate is ridiculous especially when that determination is currently being made on the battle field.
Should have followed Patton's desire to make sure the Russians had no part in Europe outside of Russia. I guess cold pragmatism aligned us with Stalin to defeat Germany.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The West used Stalin to break Hitler's neck. It was a pact with the devil against another devil.
"The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less." (Schlock Mercenary Maxim #29)
It was mutual, by the way. Stalin (or one of his generals?) said "even with the devil you may walk to the end of the bridge". That is, to them the west was the devil, and they were using the west just like the west was using them.
This is the plot of flubber with Robin Williams…
I like the post, and I would upvote it if the title was more descriptive of the actual content instead of a clickbait-y "hook" that hints nothing about the topic.
I thought I'd be reading about an interesting neuroscience case (or whatever), but it's a review/short synopsis of a mathematician's biography. The wedding anecdote is just the last paragraph.
The story about the wedding is one short paragraph at the end - with almost no extra information and not referenced elsewhere in the article. Very anticlimactic.
> But the story in the book that I liked the most is this one: Zariski was, of course, very much obsessed with mathematics. On the day he and his fiancée Yole were getting married, with Yole already dressed in white and veiled and the rabbi standing by, the bridegroom was nowhere to be found. It turned out he was working on a mathematical problem. Luckily, Yole was neither angry nor surprised; she was amused. Ha! I need to tell this to my wife.
Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is" to quote Ian Banks' "Excession". It's also helpful to characterize a person not just by their character, tenacity or energy, or age, but also a number between 0 and 1 that indicates how much of their time they've spent in the real world, vs in their happy fun space. Call it the "imagination factor". A bright, capable mind of 40 with an imagination factor of .75 may only have the cumulative real-world experience of a 10-year-old.
It's unclear to me what you're defining as real. Coal mining? Childcare? Community centers? Through hiking? Interesting theoretical realms can have enormous consequences in the physical/tangible world, as I'm sure you know :). Maybe it's more of a "presence factor" in relation to this story: a measure of how aware you are of the roles and responsibilities you have and how engaged with them you are.
I make no value judgement here. I thought the OP's post was interesting as an example of how humans can mediate their own "VR" experience, and have done so for all of human history. The "absent-minded professor" is a stereotype for a reason. It can be disconcerting for someone with high imagination factor to interact with someone with an imagination factor of 0, even if all other qualities (age, culture, language, etc) are the same, since the paths they have both walked are so very different. The error modes that arise from impedance mismatch go in both directions. It's not clear what nature will select for. Certainly over short periods of time, nature has selected for heavy abstraction and all the military/economic power it yields. The longer time frame has not yet played out.
The path everyone has walked is different from everyone else. You seem to be trying to reduce it to a formula, coin new terms, and literally apply numeric values to people. I don't think anyone is that simple in reality.
If you have struggled to interact with people who are different than you, that is also part of the human experience, not something we need to devise measurements for.
Your strawman assumes a reductive user who will replace a person with a number. This of course happens in real life, with IQ, Meyers-Briggs, and so on. This is wrong. It is a kind of wrongness exemplified by "Animal Farm", the nuanced ideals of revolution that eventually reduce to "4 legs good; 2 legs bad".
IF is a tool mostly to remind high IF people to cherish the value of both real and imaginary experience, and a tool to help people who dwell mostly in either realm to respect each other. If a high IF person forgets to respect the real, he's liable to forget his wedding. If a low IF person forgets, he's liable to miss out on the wonder and value of abstract thought.
Of course, there is disagreement on a person’s roles and responsibilities.
To someone, my responsibility might be answering the doorbell quickly when Amazon drops off a package.
To another, it might be how responsive I am to email.
These are in conflict, and sometimes it’s worth missing an Amazon package to finish an important email.
Absolutely, the concept of roles and responsibilities is highly subjective
> A bright, capable mind of 40 with an imagination factor of .75 may only have the cumulative real-world experience of a 10-year-old.
While provocative, that argument does not take into account the development of the brain. Processing early experiences are far different from the ones when the brain is fully developed. This includes the storage of memories (knowledge).
The fact that our identities are a path integral through a unique 4 dimensional spacetime curve does not undermine the utility of first-order characterizations of the resulting value. We do it all the time: where are you from? When were you born? What did you study? What's your favorite ice cream flavor? I am simply adding, and characterizing, an additional factor: how often do you dream? None of the answers to these questions tell the whole story of a person, but they are useful nevertheless.
I like the cut of your jib and I'm assuming your factor is north of 0.5?
You take a strange lesson from an anecdote about artificial super-intelligences. In the book, the AIs can spend time in a limitless virtual universe, better than reality.
Time spent in "infinite fun" (as they call it) has no value because it has no impact on what happens in the real world, hence the importance of remembering where the off-switch is. It's about having an effect on the world, not the world having an effect on you.
Someone who spends a lot of time (and in all likelihood is wired to spend a lot of time) thinking about their work is not wasting their time; they are preparing to have an effect on the world.
Where did you see a value judgment? The imagination factor is a trade-off, neither good nor bad in itself. It's normally distributed, and selection pressure will push the median up or down. The utility of the concept comes in personal interaction - those with high IF speaking with low IF people should respect the value of (perhaps multiples) of real-world experience that they have. In effect, the concept of IF is a tool of both humility and empathy.
"Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to remember where the off switch is."
And you didn't say anything about "real-worlders" having humility and respect for the other party.
I think a reasonable person infers a value judgment from those two things together.
> Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is"
If this world is a simulation, and someone among us is the player-character, forgetting that there is an off switch is a feature for them that increases immersion by making any failure to suspend disbelief (which I as a probable NPC suffer from regulary) a moot issue. As long as we think that this is reality, its believability is subordinate to its survivability.
"If this world is a simulation" then anything can follow, which makes it an uninteresting hypothetical.
You might be right but...
If this world is a simulation knowing the nature might let us work with it better. Hacking the universe (maybe or maybe not if a simulation). It would in some ways just become an extension of physics (in effect).
This gives me an opportunity to bring up a favorite story of mine.
Wang's Carpets by Greg Egan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang%27s_Carpets
Overall I find the "imagination factor" as an useful tool for self-reflection and understanding others
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Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of what you think of another commenter's comments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Self awareness puts them at least above .5 on the real world portion
Headline should be "Oscar Zariski - forgot about his own wedding" in accordance with HN headline guidelines.
This seems to be one of those non-converging title sequences because no option satisfies everyone.
We eventually changed it to "Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry", even though this omits the anecdote which the thread is mostly about. People won't miss that if they see the article's own title though.
Could you cite the guideline? I couldn't find it; I thought the idea is to use the original title where possible.
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
And in this case, it seems misleading and definitely clickbait. The quote at the end doesn't support the claim that he forgot anything.
The citation (https://books.google.com/books?id=9zu0BQAAQBAJ&pg=PA33&lpg=P... ) doesn't support the claim either. It sounds more like the story was: While waiting for his wife to arrive at their wedding ceremony, he stepped away and passed the time by working on a problem.
Oscar Zariski - forgot about his own wedding is the original title on the article.
The title I objected to was "A man who forgot about his own wedding". This title was actually edited to make it more clickbaity before it was later edited to be less clickbaity.
It's literal clickbait as you're moved to click to figure out who that man is.
This isn't clickbait in the slightest, this low level obsession with labeling anything that isn't entirely descriptive as clickbait is obnoxious.
Not every article title has to be "A 500 word blog post on Oscar Zariski, covering years 1899-1960, published May 26th 3PM EST, by Boogie Math"
These anecdotes not only humanize these brilliant minds but also offer a humorous and endearing look at the quirks that often accompany such intense intellectual focus.
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