Gödel
“The examiner was intelligent enough to quickly quieten Gödel and say ‘Oh god, let’s not go into this’ and broke off the examination at this point, greatly to our relief” — Oskar Morgenstern Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) was the greatest logician who ever lived. At the age of 24, he
Applied Statistics
Implications of Condorcet’s jury theorem
Abel
“Although Abel shared with many mathematicians a complete lack of musical talent, I will not sound absurd if I compare his kind of…
Ramanujan
“I had never seen anything in the least like [it] before” — G.H. Hardy On or about the 31st of January 1913, mathematician G.H. Hardy (1877-1947) of Trinity College at Cambridge University received a parcel of papers from Madras, India. The package included a cover letter where a young
Mathematics
The Martians of Budapest”, sometimes referred to as simply “The Martians” is a colloquial term used to describe a group of prominent Hungarian physicists and mathematicians who emigrated to the United States following the Great Purge of 1933.
Analysis
“Diagonalization seems to show that there is an inexhaustibility phenomenon for definability similar to that for provability” — Franzén…
Feynman
“I went through fire on my first.” While still a graduate student at Princeton University in 1940, Richard P. Feynman (1918–1988) gave his first lecture in a seminar on electrodynamics, the topic that would eventually earn him the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics. In front of a prestigious audience
Gödel
Hungarian polymath John von Neumann (1903–1957) once wrote that Kurt Gödel was “absolutely irreplaceable” and “in a class by himself”.
Ramanujan
On or about the 31st of January 1913, mathematician G.H. Hardy (1877-1947) of Trinity College at Cambridge University received a parcel of papers from Madras, India which included a cover letter from an aspiring young Indian mathematician by the name of Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920).
Game Theory
“Oh that place. It’s so crowded nobody goes there anymore.” — Yogi Berra
Physics
The now famous Einstein-Szilárd letter was written at the initiative of Hungarian nuclear physicist Leó Szilárd with help from Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner in 1939.
Feynman
«You don’t understand “ordinary people”. To you they are “stupid fools”» Entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram is a unique egg. By age 14, he had written three books on particle physics. He earned his Ph.D. at age 20 and began publishing research papers at the age of 18, some of