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mendax writes:

The New York Times published an article in its magazine about one of the greatest mathematicians living today, Terry Tao. The first paragraph should whet one's appetite for the rest of the article:

This April, as undergraduates strolled along the street outside his modest office on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, the mathematician Terence Tao mused about the possibility that water could spontaneously explode. A widely used set of equations describes the behavior of fluids like water, but there seems to be nothing in those equations, he told me, that prevents a wayward eddy from suddenly turning in on itself, tightening into an angry gyre, until the density of the energy at its core becomes infinite: a catastrophic ‘‘singularity.’’ Someone tossing a penny into the fountain by the faculty center or skipping a stone at the Santa Monica beach could apparently set off a chain reaction that would take out Southern California.

There are some people who are just too smart, and this guy is one of them.

Original Submission

1. "mendax" - https://soylentnews.org/~mendax/
2. "article" - http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/magazine/the-singular-mind-of-terry-tao.html
3. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=8497

printed from SoylentNews, The Singular Mind of Terry Tao on 2024-05-15 09:49:24