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Atanu Dey's avatar

Since David mentioned Neuman and Wigner, I would like to leave this here.

Enrico Fermi famously asked "Where are they?" Leo Szilard had an answer. “They are among us,” he said, “but they call themselves Hungarians.” Plausible because Hungarians are weirdly super-intelligent. In fact, they have been suspected of being "Martians."

The following bit is from the wiki:

“The Martians” was the name of a group of prominent scientists (mostly, but not exclusively physicists and mathematicians) who emigrated from Hungary to the United States in the early half of the 20th century. They included, among others, Theodore von Kármán, John von Neumann, Paul Halmos, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, George Pólya, and Paul Erdős. They received the name from a fellow Martian Leó Szilárd, who jokingly suggested that Hungary was a front for aliens from Mars.

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Frank's avatar

This is not exactly what David is driving at, but I can't help recounting a humorous anecdote about an economist who has made a great success in labor economics. He was top of his class as an undergrad in the midwest and was accepted to MIT for graduate school. On the first day of Micro, the instructor walked in and said: Microeconomics is nothing more than the mathematical theory of intersecting hyperplanes. Our hero said to himself: How did I get here?

I personally had that experience with "the principal minors of the bordered hessian matrices alternate in sign". Not very intuitive at all! I didn't even know the definitions of the words. Eventually learned this stuff when the math got simpler.

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