Wednesday, November 12, 2008

nick trefethen is funny

Interesting note - problem 21.5 in Dr Nick Trefethen's book "Numerical Linear Algebra" is hard. My prof assigned it to us on accident, but realized soon afterwards that it was basically an unsolved problem. He emailed Trefethen, asking him about the problem in his book, and Trefethen's reply was (almost verbatim)
"Dear me, I have no idea what I was thinking when I put that problem in the book!"
Heh.

5 comments:

jglc said...

oh those zany academics

DavidsDiary said...

oh how funny
all the math problems you do are unsolvable
my unsolvable problem usually involves deciding whether to fold or crumple

Pat Hastings said...

You should tell Embree!

mon said...

dear jesse, you should name your blog "things about me". love, mon and peter. :)

lil'lam said...

Don't you hate it when they do that?

grrr.

(He was probably hoping someone would solve it for him. Those profs. can be sneaky.)