R.D. Silverman has PM'd me, remarking on the lack of RIP posts for the recently-deceased famous mathematicians [url=https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018/12/28/pioneering-princeton-mathematician-elias-stein-dies]Elias Stein[/url], [url=https://www.ias.edu/press-releases/2019/jean-bourgain-obituary]Jean Bourgain[/url], and [url=https://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/news/sir-peter-swinnerton-dyer-1927-2018/]Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer[/url].

[QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;505305]R.D. Silverman has PM'd me, remarking on the lack of RIP posts for the recently-deceased famous mathematicians....[/QUOTE]
Thanks for that. He does have a good point about that. Not being connected to that world I would not have known about these.

[QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;505305]R.D. Silverman has PM'd me, remarking on the lack of RIP posts for the recently-deceased famous mathematicians [url=https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018/12/28/pioneering-princeton-mathematician-elias-stein-dies]Elias Stein[/url], [url=https://www.ias.edu/press-releases/2019/jean-bourgain-obituary]Jean Bourgain[/url], and [url=https://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/news/sir-peter-swinnerton-dyer-1927-2018/]Sir Peter Swinnerton-Dyer[/url].[/QUOTE]I received a similar PM but took no action other than reminding him that he could post for himself.

Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, famous for being two-thirds of the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, lived about 5 miles from me. I met him a few times at conferences and at local pubs.

[QUOTE=xilman;505323]I received a similar PM but took no action other than reminding him that he could post for himself.[/QUOTE]

Many here wish that R.D. Silverman would have the courage to return to this forum.

He can be a bit of a difficult fellow. But sometimes the most difficult are also the most valuable, and we welcome the challenges (:smile:)....

P.S. Sir. Isaac Newton was known for being a bit of an annoyance to many, but he did advance the state of the art in many fields....

[QUOTE=chalsall;505327]Many here wish that R.D. Silverman would have the courage to return to this forum.

He can be a bit of a difficult fellow. But sometimes the most difficult are also the most valuable, and we welcome the challenges (:smile:)....
.[/QUOTE]

About your first sentence please don’t go that way.

[QUOTE=pinhodecarlos;505332]About your first sentence please don’t go that way.[/QUOTE]

What way would you like me to go instead?

[QUOTE=chalsall;505327]P.S. Sir. Isaac Newton was known for being a bit of an annoyance to many, but he did advance the state of the art in many fields....[/QUOTE]
I'm sure that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (also spelled Leibnitz) and John Harrison thought he was far more than a bit of an annoyance.

Newton is reputed to have been a thoroughly unpleasant character. This was incorporated into [i]Star Trek: The Next Generation[/i] when he, along with Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, were Holodeck characters playing poker with Commander Data. Newton got such lines as, "Don't patronize me, I invented physics!" and, to Einstein, "Can't you do simple arithmetic?" (which apparently Einstein did have trouble with).

[QUOTE=Uncwilly;505304]Anyone else notice that they were all 76? Bad week for folks of that age.[/QUOTE]
Kind of like 27 for rock stars?[INDENT][URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janis_Joplin"]Janis Joplin[/URL]
[URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Hendrix"]Jimmy Hendrix[/URL]
[URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Morrison"]Jim Morrison[/URL]
[URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_%22Pigpen%22_McKernan"]Ron "Pigpen" McKernan[/URL]
[URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27_Club"]27 Club[/URL]
[/INDENT]

[QUOTE=chalsall;505327]Many here wish that R.D. Silverman would have the courage to return to this forum.[/QUOTE]

I don't think he ever lacked courage. Maybe mellowness.

If math were automobiles, many of us here would be car owners, or sometimes taxi fleet operators. We're not mechanics or engineers. Sometimes Bob expected everyone here to be willing to learn how to build a Tesla.

The demands of life are such that I have to prioritize things like improving my inadequate programming skills over improving my far more inadequate math knowledge.

Some roads won't be traveled, for lack of time and lifetime. Everyone eventually has to come to terms with that.

[QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;505303][URL="https://www.apnews.com/93eeb93e973b48c880f1bb21a23094dd"]"Engineer Of Heaven" Eugeniu Iordachescu[/URL][/QUOTE]
Rest in peace! This man was a genius. There is a movie (which I have somewhere, I will look on the web and if I can't find a link, I will look in the box and post it somewhere, with the link) done by the communists in the 70-80-ies, fast time lapse of such a move, and big propaganda, where you could actually SEE the church "walking" through the city. That is a wonderful clip, I must find. I remember it because it was one of the first "time lapse" speedups I ever seen and it marked me a lot at the time.

[QUOTE=GP2;505356]Sometimes Bob expected everyone here to be willing to learn how to build a Tesla.

The demands of life are such that I have to prioritize things like improving my inadequate programming skills over improving my far more inadequate math knowledge.

Some roads won't be traveled, for lack of time and lifetime. Everyone eventually has to come to terms with that.[/QUOTE]I've known Bob for almost 30 years now. He has most certainly come to terms with the fact that he, like everyone else, can not learn everything.

I once challenged him with a few chemistry questions which I would expect a second-year undergraduate to answer easily but not anyone with only high school education. As expected, he failed the exam[SUP]*[/SUP]. There have been a number of occasions, both on the forum and elsewhere, when Bob has admitted his lack of knowledge on a subject and of his willingness to learn more about it.

Bob truly doesn't mind honest ignorance, though he (and I) regard it as a curable complaint. What infuriates him is pretension and deception. There are people here who spout off pretending to have knowledge which they quite clearly lack and then refuse to acknowledge their ignorance and to accept that they have been misleading others who are at least as ignorant. Such behaviour annoys me but perhaps I'm more mellow.


* Bob quite rightly pointed out that he did not post erroneous gibberish on chemical subjects. He knew his limits. He also knows slightly more chemistry than before.