{"id":887,"date":"2012-02-07T08:15:27","date_gmt":"2012-02-07T13:15:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/?p=887"},"modified":"2012-02-07T19:24:32","modified_gmt":"2012-02-08T00:24:32","slug":"mathematicians-tell-stories-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/2012\/02\/07\/mathematicians-tell-stories-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Mathematicians Tell Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On the occasion of its centennial, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rsme.es\/\">Royal Spanish Math Society<\/a> has published a commemorative issue of their <a href=\"http:\/\/rmi.rsme.es\/\">Revista<\/a>. Mathematicians describe some early influential encounters with mathematics.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/files\/2012\/02\/Kohn.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/files\/2012\/02\/Kohn.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"101\" height=\"133\" \/> <\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/files\/2012\/02\/Wiener.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/files\/2012\/02\/Wiener.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"130\" height=\"133\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><!--more-->J. J. Kohn describes early encounters with Norbert Wiener (photos from math.harvard.edu and museum.mit.edu). In his last year as an undergraduate at MIT, he took Wiener&#8217;s course on Fourier Series and Integrals. After a highly technical first lecture, Wiener spent most of the second examining each integer from 1 to 100 to determine whether it was prime, and then suddenly said that the sum of the reciprocals of all the primes &#8220;clearly diverges because of its arithmetical character.&#8221; Kohn admits that &#8220;over half a century later, I am still puzzled.&#8221; Another day Wiener described his latest detective story, a murder mystery in which all clues were mathematical. Kohn also describes Wiener&#8217;s bumbling attempts at chess.<\/p>\n<p>Kohn also talks about Warren Ambrose, his talk at the Unitarian Church in Boston on &#8220;Why I am an atheist,&#8221; and his easy survival of a beating by police rifle butts by adapting to its rhythm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On the occasion of its centennial, the Royal Spanish Math Society has published a commemorative issue of their Revista. Mathematicians describe some early influential encounters with mathematics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":269,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,14042,14043],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-general-interest","category-math"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/269"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=887"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":900,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887\/revisions\/900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/Morgan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}