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posted by on Thursday June 08 2017, @04:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the bonus dept.

[...] Paul Erdős, became perhaps the most notorious mathematician of the 20th century. Erdős spent nearly his entire life crashing on other mathematicians' couches and subsisting on the small sums he received for giving talks at universities around the world. He also had a fondness for devising math problems and offering bounties to anyone who could solve them.

"Over the years it was kind of a habit he had to say, 'Here's a nice problem, I thought about it for a while, and I don't see how to solve it. Maybe it's a $25 problem or possibly a $100 problem,'" said Ronald Graham, a mathematician at the University of California, San Diego, and a longtime friend of Erdős's.

In offering small prizes, Erdős was continuing a tradition that flourished in Poland in the early 20th century in cafés where young mathematicians gathered to match wits and push against the frontiers of mathematics.

[...] In that culture, it was also common for mathematicians to back a newly posed problem with a prize — a bottle of wine or a nice meal to whoever could pull the sword from the stone.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @09:12PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @09:12PM (#522796)
    • People don't just hand resources to wealthy individuals; it must be maintained. If some playboy inherits wealth, then his bad bets means he will squander it away—which happens all the time! Good riddance to the fool! His decision-making power is being stripped away, saving the rest of society from enduring his idiotic allocation of resources. More to the point, though, what if he lives on the interest from his bank balance? Well, that interest money doesn't just come from nowhere: It comes from the fact that skilled people at a bank are making good bets with the capital that is made available by the playboy; if the playboy remains profitable in this fashion, then he is making a decent bet! Society is benefiting from his stewardship of that wealth, no matter how indirect that stewardship might be.

    • Poor people are not just potentially wealthy people who have happened to fall on hard times; for one, you'll notice that poor people tend to have a whole lot more children than wealthy people, and they tend to be much more obese, and suffer from indulgence-induced medical troubles (obesity, alcoholism, lung cancer, etc.); this seems totally backwards until you realize something: The vast majority of poor people are pretty damn stupid. Guess what? IQ testing bears this out; poor people are significantly dumber than even the middle class.

      This is why Democracy is a terrible idea: The fool's vote carries as much weight as the scholar's; the more that the dregs participate in decision-making, the more a society descends into socialism, and the quicker the whole machine goes tits up. It happens over and over and over throughout history. Keep the proles away from the controls.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @09:56PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @09:56PM (#522815)

    Having more kids, lower IQ, medical issues, addiction, etc., are CAUSED by being poor, not the other way around. The wealthy have less kids because they don't have the genetic urge to pump them out because theirs' are less likely to die. There are tons of studies on relation of wealth to IQ, and there is plenty of evidence that kids who don't have adequate nutrition, parental supervision/contact, and are raised in dangerous environments have lower IQ's (being poor causes them to have lower IQ, not the other way around!). Long hours, shitty food, stress, and all the other afflictions of the lower classes cause medical issues, and help to propagate addiction...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @10:27PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @10:27PM (#522823)

      As always, you people get the causation backwards. Having a lower IQ leads to those problems, and those problems lead to poverty.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @11:09PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @11:09PM (#522834)

        As always, ignorant bigots like you willfully ignore reality because you love to feel superior, rather than accepting that your station in life is determined by 9 parts luck and 1 part ability... You're no better than anyone else, you just have more money. The sooner we can get rid of the current sociopathic economic/governmental policies inspired by Hobbes and Plato, the better, in my opinion.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @11:39PM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @11:39PM (#522847)

          There is nothing more sociopathic than the notion that "others should do as I say" (or, similarly, "others should fund my existence"); that is the very principle on which government is fundamentally based—there is no form of government that is not based on this principle.

          In contrast, capitalism is the most respectful of each individual: Do only as you and others have agreed in advance.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @11:52PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @11:52PM (#522856)

            Notice I didn't mention Adam Smith? Capitalism has some flaws, but it works by and large. Our system, however, is not capitalism, and our government has been an authoritarian/oligarchic mess since it's inception, although for the most part it has worked better than other forms. As you say, government is anti-social by it's very nature, and I would say that the concept of government/attachment to social hierarchy is the number one thing holding our species back from fulfilling it's potential. If half as much effort was put towards working to the common good as is now spent on maintaining divisions in society all of humanity would be far better off.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @12:31AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @12:31AM (#522868)

              There is only individual self-interest.

              If you seek to further the "common good", then you'll only end up worshiping the principle that "others should do as you say".