Science jokes

Einstein and cataclysms

As you know, Einstein renounced his German citizenship and moved to the United States in 1933. However, this was already at the end of spring, and at the beginning of spring he was still in... the USA and was preparing to return to old Europe. The fact is that, starting in 1930, Einstein spent every winter in California, where he lectured at the Pasadena Institute of Technology.

The event we are talking about happened before leaving California. Taking advantage of his last free hours, Einstein walked around campus and met a colleague, a famous seismologist. They said hello and started talking. At one point, Einstein asked whether it was possible to develop instruments so sophisticated that they could predict earthquakes with great accuracy. “This would make it possible to prepare society for the upcoming danger,” Einstein formulated.

The seismologist liked this simple idea so much that he and Einstein were completely absorbed in it and completely forgot about time. When Einstein finally looked at his watch, he saw that several hours had already passed, and he hurried: his wife was waiting for him at the hotel, it was time to leave.

When Einstein entered the hotel, there was some kind of commotion in it - everyone was running somewhere, talking loudly... The scientist went up to his room and found his wife there, pale with excitement and fear.

- What happened, Elsa?

“Are you still asking what happened?!” Where have you been? Earthquake!!!

P. _ S. _ The story is almost certainly reliable : the earthquake [1] occurred precisely 10 on March , when Einstein leaving by train was for New York , and then by boat to Europe [2].

This crazy professor Wiener ...

Norbert Wiener, if not the champion among scientists of the 20th century in terms of the number of tales told about him, is very close to that. But it seems that all three below are real stories, retold by colleagues who knew Wiener well.

story The first ( story by Dirk Jan Stroik ). After the release and tremendous success of Cybernetics, Wiener unexpectedly encountered a huge number of fans and followers. Just as Marx tried to distance himself from his own early views by saying that he was not a Marxist, Wiener coined and repeated to friends the phrase: “I am Wiener, but I am not a Wienerian.” One of the friends responded: “Of course not, but you infected everyone with the venereal disease.”

Story two . One day, after finishing a scientific conference, Wiener couldn’t remember where exactly in the parking lot he left his car. So he waited until all the other conference participants had left the parking lot, and then headed to the last remaining car.

Story three . Wiener was constantly unlucky with cars. One day he drove his car to a conference at Yale University. At the end of the conference, he discovered that he did not have his driver's license with him, so he calmly returned home (to Cambridge, Massachusetts) on a regular bus. The next morning, upon reaching his garage, Wiener found it empty and wrote a statement to the police that while he was leaving for a conference, his car was stolen...

Soviet censorship

Helmut Hasse's book "Lectures on Number Theory" was translated from German and published in 1953. In the original, the first paragraph of its first chapter (“Natural, integer and rational numbers”) began with a mention of Leopold Kronecker’s famous saying that God created the natural numbers, and everything else is the work of human hands. This paragraph was not included in the translation.

When Hasse arrived in the USSR ten years later, his Moscow colleagues explained to him that the state publishing house of foreign literature had removed this paragraph from the finished layout of the book. Because there is no God.

Multipurpose hanger

At the entrance to the Faculty of Mathematics there is a coat rack with a sign “For Faculty Teachers Only.”

And below is a handwritten addition: “Can also be used for coats and hats.”

family Dirichlet's

Rebecca, the younger sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, married the mathematician Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet.

And her brother’s famous wedding march was written 10 years later...

Felix and Rebecca's father was a wealthy banker, the creator of a bank that flourished for more than 100 years - right up until the Nazis came to power and nationalized the banking system.

And another roll call of generations. The Mendelssohn house, where Peter met Rebecca, was located in Berlin at Leipzigerstrasse 3. And after World War II, the building of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR was built at this address. Perhaps there are still scientific institutes there, although this Stalinist Empire style in the center of Berlin looks completely foreign.

Valuable book

A certain mathematics professor gave a student his recently published book with a request to read it carefully and then tell him what he thought about it. However, their paths soon diverged: the war began, and the former student became a soldier. However, at the first post-war meeting, the professor asked:

- Well, young man, what can you say about my book?

— A wonderful book, professor. She saved my life!

— ??!!

“I carried it in my breast pocket throughout the war, and when an enemy bullet hit me, it couldn’t get further than the problem book of the first chapter.”