May/June, 2007
editAbout two months ago there was a fairly hilarious discussion of the "prime factorization of unity", with some people arguing that 1 can be expressed as the "empty product" of an arbitrary number of primes. Others – myself included – argued that such a notion just doesn't make any sense, no matter how "rigorous" the reasoning behind it.
Anyway, I was reading about a number theorist named Carl Ludwig Siegel when I ran across this gem, from a letter he wrote to Louis Mordell in 1964.
When I first saw [Lang's Diophantine geometry], about a year ago, I was disgusted with the way in which my own contributions to the subject had been disfigured and made unintelligible. My feeling is very well expressed when you mention Rip van Winkle!
The whole style of the author contradicts the sense for simplicity and honesty which we admire in the works of the masters in number theory - Lagrange, Gauss, or on a smaller scale, Hardy, Landau. Just now Lang has published another book on algebraic numbers which, in my opinion, is still worse than the former one. I see a pig broken into a beautiful garden and rooting up all [the] flowers and trees.
Unfortunately there are many "fellow-travellers" who have already disgraced a large part of algebra and function theory; however, until now, number theory had not been touched. These people remind me of the impudent behaviour of the national socialists who sang: "Wir werden weiter marschieren, bis alles in Scherben zerfällt!
I am afraid that mathematics will perish before the end of this century if the present trend for senseless abstraction – as I call it: theory of the empty set – cannot be blocked up. ...
April, 2007
editThis isn't a quote, exactly, but I think it's funny.
Never p*** off an engineer.
March, 2007
editThe mathematician is an artist whose medium is the mind and whose creations are ideas.
– H.S. Wall in Creative Mathematics, University of Texas Press, 1963.
This isn't a quote, exactly, but I think it's funny. It's from a Google search on Yuval Flicker.
Amazon.ca: $100 or more - General / Political Doctrines: Books
Automorphic Representations of Low Rank Groups by Yuval Z. Flicker (Hardcover - 2006).
February, 2007
edit"IB Math IA: For better info, look under fundamental recurrence formulas" –75.111.47.188
"Hmm... if I had to deal with CONTINUED FRACTIONS, i might look under Fundamental recurrence formulas..." –75.111.47.188
Our anonymous friend actually vandalized continued fraction and golden ratio on 19 Feb, 2007. Still, it warms my heart just a little bit.
"I'm just glad most people don't get mad when you make a mistake, man would I be in trouble." –D-rew (on my talk page)