[math-fun] Turing -- world's fastest mathematician?
The page http://www.turing.org.uk/scrapbook/run.html give's Turing's marathon time (August 1947) as 2hr 46min 03sec and the winner J.T.Holden's time as 2hr 33min 20sec. Contrasting this with wikipedia re the 1948 London Olympic marathon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletics_at_the_1948_Summer_Olympics_–_Men's_marathon we see that Turing's time would have been good enough for him to place 15th out of the 30 finishers (41 starters), whereas Holden's time would have been good enough to just win gold. The Olympic course and/or conditions presumably were tougher, but even assuming that is worth 5 minutes, which is probably an overestimate, then Turing still would have placed 20th in the Olympics. Not too shabby! Turing was probably the world's fastest mathematician, (before say, 1970, anyhow).
Warren, That was pretty impressive. 1970 is a good guess, but I remember that a young Assistant Prof, William Harvey, at Columbia finished the Boston marathon in 2:29:22 in 1967 (see http://www.coolrunning.com/boston/results2.htm ) finishing 20th. Victor On Thu, Dec 26, 2013 at 12:42 PM, Warren D Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com>wrote:
The page http://www.turing.org.uk/scrapbook/run.html give's Turing's marathon time (August 1947) as 2hr 46min 03sec and the winner J.T.Holden's time as 2hr 33min 20sec.
Contrasting this with wikipedia re the 1948 London Olympic marathon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletics_at_the_1948_Summer_Olympics_–_Men's_marathon we see that Turing's time would have been good enough for him to place 15th out of the 30 finishers (41 starters), whereas Holden's time would have been good enough to just win gold. The Olympic course and/or conditions presumably were tougher, but even assuming that is worth 5 minutes, which is probably an overestimate, then Turing still would have placed 20th in the Olympics.
Not too shabby! Turing was probably the world's fastest mathematician, (before say, 1970, anyhow).
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This page by Brian Skinner gives an interesting statistical analysis which concludes the fastest achievable mile time is 3min 39.6sec. http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/the-fastest-possible-mile/ He then redid it for marathon finding 2hr 02min 43sec: http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/the-fastest-possible-marath... In the comments he says he thinks this estimate has an error bar of +-15 seconds, i.e. making the bold prediction that 2hr 2min will never happen. if these true, the best athletes so far were already quite near to best possible performances.
* Warren D Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com> [Dec 26. 2013 19:55]:
This page by Brian Skinner gives an interesting statistical analysis which concludes the fastest achievable mile time is 3min 39.6sec. http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/the-fastest-possible-mile/
He then redid it for marathon finding 2hr 02min 43sec: http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/the-fastest-possible-marath... In the comments he says he thinks this estimate has an error bar of +-15 seconds, i.e. making the bold prediction that 2hr 2min will never happen.
if these true, the best athletes so far were already quite near to best possible performances.
Modulo chemistry and acceptance of a short life span. OT: Is there a rule for words ending as *ance or *ence how to pick 'a' versus 'e'? (Without spell-checker I'd be doing it more often wrong than right by now; "Just do it the other way round" is not considered a valid answer). Best, jj
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I'd say No -- it's kind of random. The same kind of randomness applies to -able and -ible suffixes. (As usual in English, spelling is crazy.) --Dan On 2013-12-26, at 11:03 AM, Joerg Arndt wrote:
OT: Is there a rule for words ending as *ance or *ence how to pick 'a' versus 'e'? (Without spell-checker I'd be doing it more often wrong than right by now; "Just do it the other way round" is not considered a valid answer).
As far as 'ance' versus 'ence', this is a holdover from Latin. These words are gerunds (nouns derived from verbs). The ending are different depending on which conjugation class the original verb is in. Of course modern English has no such (obvious) distinction. English spelling has long been known to be a messy hodge-podge. Victor On Thu, Dec 26, 2013 at 2:03 PM, Joerg Arndt <arndt@jjj.de> wrote:
* Warren D Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com> [Dec 26. 2013 19:55]:
This page by Brian Skinner gives an interesting statistical analysis which concludes the fastest achievable mile time is 3min 39.6sec.
http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/the-fastest-possible-mile/
He then redid it for marathon finding 2hr 02min 43sec:
http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/the-fastest-possible-marath...
In the comments he says he thinks this estimate has an error bar of +-15 seconds, i.e. making the bold prediction that 2hr 2min will never happen.
if these true, the best athletes so far were already quite near to best possible performances.
Modulo chemistry and acceptance of a short life span.
OT: Is there a rule for words ending as *ance or *ence how to pick 'a' versus 'e'? (Without spell-checker I'd be doing it more often wrong than right by now; "Just do it the other way round" is not considered a valid answer).
Best, jj
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participants (4)
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Dan Asimov -
Joerg Arndt -
Victor Miller -
Warren D Smith