Hello my friends.
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editI don't want to work, I just want to bang on my drum all day -Todd Rundgren from Bang on the drum all day, 1983
In 1966 the famed Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, a passionate drummer, was asked by a Swedish encyclopedia publisher to supply a photograph of himself "beating the drum to give a human approach to a presentation of the difficult matter that theoretical physics represents." Feynman's reply?
- Dear Sir,
- The fact that I beat a drum has nothing to do with the fact that I do theoretical physics. Theoretical physics is a human endeavor, one of the higher developments of human beings, and the perpetual desire to prove that people who do it are human by showing that they do other things that a few other humans do (like playing bongo drums) is insulting to me. I am human enough to tell you to go to hell.
- Yours, RPF.
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God Exists!
The famed encylopedist Denis Diderot was once invited to visit the Russian Court by the empress, Catherine the Great. To the embarrassment of his host and the rest of the court, he promptly launched into an animated defense of atheism. Reluctant to muzzle her guest directly, Catherine hatched a cunning plan. Diderot was informed that a learned mathematician had discovered an algebraical demonstration of the existence of God and would present it before the Court, if he wished to hear it. Diderot naturally consented. The mathematician Leonhard Euler duly appeared and gravely declared: "Monsieur, (a + bn)/n = x, therefore God exists!" The upshot? Diderot, entirely unschooled in algebra, was rendered speechless; peals of laughter erupted around the room; Diderot, greatly embarassed, asked for permission to return to France; and Catherine gratefully bid him adieu.
Euler, Leonhard (1707-1783) Swiss mathematician [noted for his key contributions to the fields of calculus, algebra, geometry, and number theory (including complex numbers and logarithms), and for his introduction of much of the notation used in mathematics (including 'e', the base of natural logarithms, known as Euler's number)