"Who Got Einstein's Office"

[fiefoe]

If only I can get a nickle everytime I'm told the Gödel anecdote (i.e. 'Gödel noticed that... if you really looked closely enough, you'd find that the United States-quite legally!-could be turned into a dictatorship')...

Anecdotes we prefer:

• Princeton was for six months in 1783... the capital of the United States.
• Flexner had tried to stop Einstein from appearing at the Royal Albert Hall in London, had intercepted important letters and telegrams, and so on and so forth.
• [Mandelbrot]: It was pitifully bad. After it was over someone came up and told me it was the worst lecture he had ever heard! But the day was saved by a very marvelous summary by Oppenheimer and by von Neumann. Oppenheimer and von Neumann regave my lecture, each of them in turn, but much better than I could do it, and so finally it was a very triumphal event.
• "The lengths of the common frontiers between Spain and Portugal, or Belgium and Netherlands , as reported in those neighbors' encyclopedias, differ by 20 percent," Mandelbrot says. "One should not be surprised that a small country (Portugal) measures its borders more accurately than its big neighbor."
• Benoit Mandelbrot named one of his more symmetrical and pleasing fractal shapes the San Marco dragon. "This is a mathematician's wild extrapolation of the skyline of the Basilica in Venice, together with its reflection in a flooded Piazza."
  

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