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Tag Archives: Mason Currey

Einstein’s Daily Routine

08 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Science

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Albert Einstein, Biography, Daily Rituals, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Mason Currey, Princeton University, science

Albert Einstein

“Einstein immigrated to the United States in 1933, where he held a professorship at Princeton University until his retirement in 1945. His routine there was simple. Between 9:00 and 10:00 A.M. he ate breakfast and perused the daily papers. At about 10:30 he left for his Princeton office, walking when the weather was nice; otherwise, a station wagon from the university would pick him up. He worked until 1:00, then returned home for a 1:30 lunch, a nap, and a cup of tea. The rest of the afternoon was spent at home, continuing his work, seeing visitors, and dealing with the correspondence that his secretary had sorted earlier in the day. Supper was at 6:30, followed by more work and more letters.

Despite his humble lifestyle, Einstein was a celebrity in Princeton, famous not only for his scientific accomplishments but also for his absentmindedness and disheveled appearance. (Einstein wore his hair long to avoid visits to the barber and eschewed socks and suspenders, which he considered unnecessary.) Walking to and from work, he was often waylaid by locals who wanted to meet the great physicist. A colleague remembered, ‘Einstein would pose with the waylayer’s wife, children, or grandchildren as desired and exchange a few good-humored words.

Then he would go on, shaking his head, saying: ‘Well, the old elephant has gone through his tricks again.’ ”

__________

The section on Albert Einstein in Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.

In unrelated news, my policy project A Small Step to Reducing Gun Violence has made the Georgetown media Hall of Fame for 2013. Watch it below:

GunThe Gun Puzzle

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Turning Coffee into Theorems

30 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Science

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Daily Rituals, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Mason Currey, math, mathematics, Paul Erdős, science

Paul Erdős

“Paul Erdős was one of the most brilliant and prolific mathematicians of the twentieth century. He was also, as Paul Hoffman documents in his book The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, a true eccentric—a ‘mathematical monk’ who lived out of a pair of suitcases, dressed in tattered suits, and gave away almost all the money he earned, keeping just enough to sustain his meager lifestyle; a hopeless bachelor who was extremely (perhaps abnormally) devoted to his mother and never learned to cook or even boil his own water for tea; and a fanatic workaholic who routinely put in nineteen-hour days, sleeping only a few hours a night.

Erdős liked to work in short, intense collaborations with other mathematicians, and he crisscrossed the globe seeking fresh talent, often camping out in colleagues’ homes while they worked on a problem together. One such colleague remembered an Erdos visit from the 1970s:

… he only needed three hours of sleep. He’d get up early and write letters, mathematical letters. He’d sleep downstairs. The first time he stayed, the clock was set wrong. It said 7:00, but it was really 4:30 A.M. He thought we should be up working, so he turned on the TV full blast. Later, when he knew me better, he’d come up at some early hour and tap on the bedroom door. ‘Ralph, do you exist?’ The pace was grueling. He’d want to work from 8:00 A.M. until 1:30 A.M. Sure we’d break for short meals but we’d write on napkins and talk math the whole time. He’d stay a week or two and you’d collapse at the end.

Erdős owed his phenomenal stamina to amphetamines—he took ten to twenty milligrams of Benzedrine or Ritalin daily. Worried about his drug use, a friend once bet Erdős that he wouldn’t be able to give up amphetamines for a month. Erdős took the bet and succeeded in going cold turkey for thirty days. When he came to collect his money, he told his friend, ‘You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathematics back a month.’ After the bet, Erdős promptly resumed his amphetamine habit, which he supplemented with shots of strong espresso and caffeine tablets. ‘A mathematician,’ he liked to say, ‘is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.'”

__________

From the section on Paul Erdős in Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.

Erdős also had a distinctive lexicon which he used regardless if his audience understood its terms or not. For instance, although he was an atheist, Erdős spoke of “The Book” — a hypothetical volume into which God had poured his most nebulous mathematical proofs. He would frequently declare, “You don’t have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book.”

Moreover, while he doubted the existence of God, he referred to the divine as the “Supreme Fascist,” or SF, which he accused of hiding his socks and Hungarian passports, and of concealing the most exquisite mathematical concepts and proofs from man. Often Erdős would declare, after discovering an especially beautiful mathematical proof, “This one’s from The Book!”.

Some other terms from Erdős’s dictionary:

– Children were referred to as “epsilons” (because in mathematics, particularly calculus, an arbitrarily small positive quantity is commonly denoted by the Greek letter (ε))
– Women were “bosses”
– Men were “slaves”
– People who stopped doing mathematics had “died”
– People who physically died had “left”
– Music was “noise”
– To give a mathematical lecture was “to preach”
– To give an oral exam to a student was “to torture” him/her.

Erdős’s affirmative mantra was, “Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back.”

He also declared, “Why are numbers beautiful? It’s like asking why is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don’t see why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is.”

For his epitaph, he suggested, “Végre nem butulok tovább,” which is Hungarian for “I’ve finally stopped getting dumber.”

Erdős is also the only person to have an Erdős number of 0.

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Mark Twain’s Daily Routine

26 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Daily Rituals, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, drinking, insomnia, Mark Twain, Mason Currey, sleep, Smoking, Writing

Mark Twain

“In the 1870s and ’80s, the Twain family spent their summers at Quarry Farm in New York, about two hundred miles west of their Hartford, Connecticut, home. Twain found those summers the most productive time for his literary work, especially after 1874, when the farm owners built him a small private study on the property. That same summer, Twain began writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. His routine was simple: he would go to the study in the morning after a hearty breakfast and stay there until dinner at about 5:00. Since he skipped lunch, and since his family would not venture near the study—they would blow a horn if they needed him—he could usually work uninterruptedly for several hours. ‘On hot days,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in the same thin linen we make shirts of.’

After dinner, Twain would read his day’s work to the assembled family. He liked to have an audience, and his evening performances almost always won their approval. On Sundays, Twain skipped work to relax with his wife and children, read, and daydream in some shady spot on the farm. Whether or not he was working, he smoked cigars constantly. One of his closest friends, the writer William Dean Howells, recalled that after a visit from Twain, ‘the whole house had to be aired, for he smoked all over it from breakfast to bedtime.’ Howells also records Twain’s difficulties getting to sleep at night:

In those days he was troubled with sleeplessness, or, rather, with reluctant sleepiness, and he had various specifics for promoting it. At first it had been champagne just before going to bed, and we provided that, but later he appeared from Boston with four bottles of lager-beer under his arms; lager-beer, he said now, was the only thing to make you go to sleep, and we provided that. Still later, on a visit I paid him at Hartford, I learned that hot Scotch was the only soporific worth considering, and Scotch whiskey duly found its place on our sideboard. One day, very long afterward, I asked him if he were still taking hot Scotch to make him sleep. He said he was not taking anything. For a while he had found going to bed on the bath-room floor a soporific; then one night he went to rest in his own bed at ten o’clock, and he had gone promptly to sleep without anything. He had done the like with the like effect ever since. Of course, it amused him; there were few experiences of life, grave or gay, which did not amuse him, even when they wronged him.”

__________

From the section devoted to Mark Twain, one of the finest Americans to ever breathe, from Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.

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