An illustrious education, John, but to appreciate the Newton joke, I'll have to take a class in British humor.

Hi Tim,

Here's Newton's optics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opticks
His laws of motion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion
His gravitation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton...al_gravitation

The point being it's hard to find anyone in the history of science, down to the present, who has done more. :-)
Trinity has collected mathematicians ever since. Oh, Newton also arguably invented calculus.

Cheers,
John

John, John, I get the the point, but according to Google, some variation of the punch line has been used more than 14 billion times. The joke is dead on arrival.

Yeah, it's an old joke - I heard it in 1986 - and has been much used. But that doesn't really bother me. As The Aristocrats argues, pretty much any joke is old news on the comedy circuit, making the question how it's told: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aristocrats , I think Newton sets it up as well as anyone really could.

Cheers,
John

No Marlowe graduated from my high school in Chicago, but we have won 13 state championships in football.

Here, John, is an essay on a subject you're familiar with--Ramanujan's letter to Hardy, another star in the math department at Cambridge. Have you ever looked at R's equations? Some of them are approachable.

https://www.privatdozent.co/p/ramanu...=pocket_mylist

I wish I had an Indian goddess who sent me poems and equations in my dreams.

Hi Tim,

Thank you for sharing those first letters - I'd never seen them. There's quite a good British movie on Ramanujan which reminded me how very easily Hardy might simply have discarded Ramanujan's letter. It is to Hardy's credit that he did not. Not answering a letter is very easy: Schiller spent some years not answering Holderlin's letters after Holderlin went mad, though they knew each other.

I didn't know about Ramanujan's goddess, but I did know this anecdote about the number 1729: https://www.ndtv.com/education/natio...number-2152767

Yup, Trinity collects mathematicians. I did my Ph.D. alongside Tim Gowers there, who won the Fields Medal in 1998.

Cheers,
John

Cambridge was the star of that movie, which featured a cameo of Bertrand Russel, several scenes on the famous quad, and a shot of the Principia on display. It was pretty good for a biopic.

What do you mean by "alongside Tim Gowers"?

I hope it was a cameo of an actor playing Bertrand Russell! Russell would have been fairly lifeless onscreen. :)

That year's Trinity Ph.D. crop included Tim Gowers, Anthony Lane, myself, and a variety of others - Gareth Williams, for instance. We all went up for Fellowships together. Much eating in Hall and wandering around Great Court took place.

Cheers,
John

Oh - quads are Oxford, and the Principia's in the Wren along with Newton's undergrad notebooks.

There was a young man who said God
Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no-one about in the quad.

Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd.
I am always about in the quad.
And that's why this tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God.

Here, somewhat randomly is the text of "I had a duck-billed platypus when I was up at Trinity," aka the diplomatic platypus poem: http://minsytest4.blogspot.com/2002/...arrington.html

Cheers,
John

The essay is not what I thought it would be, a colorful account of Hardy & Co. It is something else entirely, more to your father's liking than your own.

Patrick Barrington, who went down to Oxford instead of up to Trinity, is an interesting character. He worked as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park and in his spare time wrote 'Platypus,' an extravaganza of rhyme.