[Tintin]

Written down while sitting in a bookshop :

David Hilbert had a student who once submitted a proof for Reimann hypothesis. Hilbert found a flaw in the proof which even he could not fix. The student died the next year. Hilbert volunteered to speak in the memorial service. It was raining and Hilbert told the friends and relatives that the student could have gone on to greatness. Someone might carry on his work and prove the Reimann hypothesis. "Infact", continued Hilbert, to the audience standing in the rain near the grave. "Let's consider the function of a complex variable ...."

Jacques Hadamard's daughter used to tell that her father could not count beyond 4. After that came 'n'.

Another Hilbert story goes that when he wore the same torn trousers for many days, his associates got disturbed. They asked Hilbert's assistant Richard Courant to tell Hilbert this tactfully. Courant accompanied Hilbert in his walk, guided him through some bushes and took the oppurtunity to indicate that Hilbert had torn the trousers. "Oh, no", laughed Hilbert. "It has been like that for a few weeks. But nobody seems to notice".

The number of papers coming out in the name of Hardy and Littlewood in the 1910s were so many that there was a rumour among mathematicians that Littlewood is a fictitious name that Hardy invented so that he can lay the blame for the errors on him. One German mathematician, Eduard Landau, actually travelled to England to confirm that Littlewood was indeed a fictitious person.

Hardy once wrote a mathematical murder mystery. In it a mathematician solves Reimann hypothesis but gets murdered immediately by another mathematician who then publishes the proof under his name. Littlewood protested violently against Hardy publishing it and Hardy had to put if off. The murderer-mathematician had been modelled on Littlewood !

Hardy and Littlewood had laid down four axioms about how they should collaborate :

1. It didn't matter whether what they wrote to each other was right or wrong
2. There was no obligation to reply, or even read, any letter one sent to the other
3. They should not try to think about the same things
4. To avoid any quarrels, all papers would be under their joint name regardless of whether one of them had contributed nothing to the work.

The above mentioned Landau wrote a fine book on prime numbers in German. An English mathematican Hugh Montgomery tells the story of how he learned German by reading this book. The book had a historical section divided into four, about the contributions of four people. They were titled Hadamard, von Mangoldt, de la Vallee-Poussin and Verfasser. Montgomery was impressed by the works of Verfasser and wondered why he had never heard of him before. He learned much later that Verfasser meant 'author' in German.

Edited on, January 20, 2005, 12:37 PM GMT, by Tintin.