« Home | The granddaddy of all quantum weirdness » | Hundraðasta og fyrsta færslan! » | Hundraðasta færslan! » | Í prófum... » | Hvernig er það? » | Þessa dagana virðast hrollvekjur vera afar vinsæla... » | Í sumar verður Unnið á Einkaleyfastofunni Farið ... » | EPRAC MEID » | Sælar,Biðst afsökunar á ógæðum þessarar bloggsíðu ... » | Hvað er málið að leyfa mér ekki að setja inn færsl... » 

sunnudagur, maí 14, 2006 

Já Hemmi minn, það getur borgað sig að kunna Taylor

Ég á bók og í þessari bók stendur meðal annars:

During the Russian revolution, the mathematical physicist Igor Tamm was seized by anti-communist vigilantes at a village near Odessa where he had gone to barter for food. They suspected he was an anti-Ukrainian communis agitator and dragged him odd to their leader.
Asked what he did for a living, he said he was a mathematician. The sceptical gang leader began to finger the bullets and grenades slung round his neck. "All right," he said, "calculate the error when the Taylor series approximation to a function is truncated after n terms. Do this and you will go free. Fail and you will be shot." Tamm slowly calculated the answer in the dust with his quivering finger. When he had finished, the bandid cast his eye over the answer and waved him on his way.

Tamm won the 1958 Nobel prize for physics but he never did discover the identity of the unusual bandit leader.

Skrifað af Jóni Emil -