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Once someone from the engineering (or physics?) department of some university went came to see Joseph Bernstein and asked if he knew a formula for a conformal mapping of the interior of a regular $n$-gon to the upper half-plane. Bernstein knew the formula, but decided to first ask what the person needed it for. The reply was: "Well, you see, what I really need is a formula for the unit disk, but that's probably too complicated, so I decided to find out the formula for the $n$-gon first and then take the limit."
Once someone from the engineering (or physics?) department of some university went to see Joseph Bernstein and asked if he knew a formula for a conformal mapping of the interior of a regular $n$-gon to the upper half-plane. Bernstein knew the formula, but decided to first ask what the person needed it for. The reply was: "Well, you see, what I really need is a formula for the unit disk, but that's probably too complicated, so I decided to find out the formula for the $n$-gon first and then take the limit."