April 20, 2004
-
Rhetorical Question
Yesterday’s Cartesian theatre continues….
Robert Osserman, a professor emeritus of mathematics at Stanford University, is special-projects director at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, in Berkeley, Calif.
Osserman at aldaily.com today:
“The past decade has been an exciting one in the world of mathematics and a fabulous one (in the literal sense) for mathematicians, who saw themselves transformed from the frogs of fairy tales – regarded with a who-would-want-to-kiss-that aversion, when they were noticed at all – into fascinating royalty, portrayed on stage and screen….
Who bestowed the magic kiss on the mathematical frog?”
Answer:
William Randolph Hearst III.
“Trained as a mathematician at Harvard, he now likes to hang out with Ken Ribet and the other gurus at the University of California, Berkeley’s prestigious Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. Two years ago, he moderated a panel of math professors discussing Princeton professor Andrew Wiles’s historic proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.”
See also
Hearst Gift Spurs Math Center Expansion and
Review of Rational Points on Elliptic Curves by Joseph H. Silverman and John T. Tate (pdf), Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) 30 (1994), no. 2, 248–252,
by William Randolph Hearst III
and Kenneth A. Ribet.
Chet Atkins summarizes:
“And that’s the secret of frog kissin’, and you can do it too if you’ll just listen.
Just slow down, turn around, bend down and kiss you a frog! Ribet! Ribet!”
