Timeline for Pseudonyms of famous mathematicians
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 10, 2012 at 13:17 | comment | added | Robert Kucharczyk | In a similar vein, there is a joke: Why did Bourbaki stop writing textbooks? Because they discovered that Serge Lang is one person. | |
| Mar 7, 2012 at 5:07 | comment | added | Gerry Myerson | Another source, C P Snow's Foreword to Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology, p. 29: "[Littlewood] was less in the centre of the academic scene. This led to jokes from European mathematicians, such as that Hardy had invented him so as to take the blame in case there turned out anything wrong with one of their theorems." | |
| Feb 18, 2012 at 22:58 | comment | added | José Hdz. Stgo. | "... Curiously enough, Littlewood was the more self-effacing of the two. Later on, when he visited Edmund Landau at Göttingen, that irrepresible spoiled child of mathematics said to him, «So you do exist! I thought you were merely a name used by Hardy for those papers which he didn't think were quite good enough to publish under his own name.»" -- Norbert Wiener in I am a Mathematician (page 24 of the copy I own). | |
| Nov 9, 2010 at 3:32 | comment | added | Gerry Myerson | Krantz, p. 44: It is said that when Wiener first met Littlewood he exclaimed, "Oh, so you really exist. I thought that 'Littlewood' was a name that Hardy put on his weaker papers." It should be noted that there are many variations of this story, some involving Landau instead of Wiener. [Krantz then gives the version quoted in my previous comment] | |
| Nov 9, 2010 at 3:29 | comment | added | Gerry Myerson | Krantz, Mathematical Apocrypha, p. 45: It is said that Landau thought that "Littlewood" was a pseudonym for Hardy (so that it would not seem that Hardy was writing all the papers). Landau visited Cambridge, never saw Littlewood, and returned to Gottingen convinced that his theory was correct. No citation given. See also my next comment. | |
| Nov 8, 2010 at 22:14 | comment | added | Georges Elencwajg | I have read the exact same anecdote where it was Landau who thus greeted Littlewood. | |
| Nov 8, 2010 at 20:21 | comment | added | Gerry Myerson | Todd, I've tried, with no success, to pin this anecdote down. I'm not entirely convinced that it actually happened, that it isn't just a joke someone made up. | |
| Nov 8, 2010 at 17:36 | comment | added | Todd Trimble | Who was the French mathematician? | |
| Nov 7, 2010 at 22:46 | history | answered | Gerry Myerson | CC BY-SA 2.5 |