[1629] in Humor
HUMOR: The importance of the taylor series
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (abennett@MIT.EDU)
Mon Oct 7 15:23:34 1996
From: <abennett@MIT.EDU>
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 07 Oct 1996 15:00:51 EDT
From: Espacionaute Spiff domine! <MATOSSIAN@aries.colorado.edu>
From: Keith Bostic <bostic@bsdi.com>
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 1996 12:53:20 -0400
Forwarded-by: Todd Kover <kovert@umiacs.umd.edu>
Forwarded-by: Omar Siddique <omar@umbc.edu>
Forwarded-by: finin@cs.umbc.edu (Timothy Finin)
Taylor Series - a matter of life or death
>From The Observer (UK) May 16[?]
Mathematics can even be a matter of life or death. 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-Ukranian communist agitator
and dragged him off to their leader.
Asked what he did for a living he said that he was a mathematician. The
sceptical gang-leader began to finger the bullets and grenades slung
around his neck. "All right", he said, "calculate the error when the
Taylor series approximation of 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 bandit 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. But he found a sure way to
concentrate his students' minds on the practical importance of Mathematics!
