On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 08:33:12 +0800, Bjorn Vang Jensen
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Reef Fish wrote:
>
>> Bjorn, you're a remarkably well-read man about mathematicians even
>> though he couldn't even find the error in the clever Chinese proof
>> that 64 = 65.  :-)
>
>I've never made any pretenses to being mathematically gifted, and if I did,
>I would be un-masked in about 3 seconds, particularly by you :-)

Actually the remarkable thing about that proof, in retrospect, was
that it required NO prerequisite in mathematics!  :-)

Now I see why you can't post it here, because the attachment showed
MOTION of how you cut a rectangular figure and place it elsewhere,
and a couple cuts and placements completed the proof.


>> You know that there are no tenses, gender, plural, and other
>> abominable artifacts in Romantic and Germanic languages whose
>> originators were still climbing trees when the Chinese were already
>> writing poetry.

Ooops.  I think it's "Romance" languages, not "Romantic".

That's why I made the SERIOUS claim that Chinese is the SIMPLEST of
all languages.  :-)  All you have to do is remember a few pictures,
such as the Chinese character for "moon" is the picture of a (crescent)
moon.
>
>Many Asian languages still have none of those. Thai, Lao, Vietnamese and
>Khmer, for example.
>
>> I think I am the only one who calls him an idiot-savant in mathematics
>> because it describes him so much better than "bizarre" or the usually
>> used adjective "eccentric" which goes better with ellipses, parabola,
>> and hyperbola.  :)
>
>No, the book actually uses that term often :-)

You mean "eccentric", didn't you?   Not "eccentricity" which is the
key element in the definition of ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas. :)


>> He is actually quite a statistician, if you include probablists as
>> statisticians.  I used several of his theorems on the asymptotic
>> properties of RANDOM GRAPHS in my own theorems about the statistical
>> properties of CLUSTERING (numerical taxonomy or clustering).
>
>Also covered in the book, although - again - I make to pretenses to
>understanding it, with the exception of brief "aha!"-moments  :-)
>
>Bjorn

Sheesh, now *I* have to go out and buy that book and read it!

I just can't wait to see how his eccentricity gets intertwined
with the asymptotics in random graphs.  :-)))

-- Bob.