On 2016-04-25 07:59, Dan Asimov wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/25/opinion/the-mathematicians-90th-birthday-p...
—Dan
When Neil Bickford was barely 12, I admonished him not to get too comfortable in the child prodigy role, since most of the great mathematicians burnt out at 19 and spent the rest of their lives mining their old notebooks. "Oh, no! Paul Erdös was proving theorems in his 80s!" (Had his parents even heard of Paul Erdös?) "Paul Erdös is a myth we tell children, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, to keep them from becoming discouraged. What actually happens at 19 is your nose fills up with itchy hairs and you can no longer think clearly." --rwg Apropos the "right" answer: at MIT, many of my fellow freshmen were from New York State, and were traumatized by losing credit for this question on the Regents Exam: As you approach the source of a sound, the *pitch* a) increases b) decreases c) stays the same The answer was c. They were testing whether you knew the difference between pitch and intensity.