Chuck,
thanks for the stories / recollections. Some thoughts below:
> I could tell these guys were used to this kind of totally open ended
> no holds barred crazy math talk among themselves. They were dying to
> teach somebody, just about anybody, even their wheelchair mechanic,
> what they knew.
Oh yeah... old school teachers... haven't come across many of them in my educational history. My first five post-kindergarten schooling was in a Montessori style freewheeling school run by a crazy 70 year old who had been in the teaching industry for 50 years. He was interested and curious about anything and knew something (of significance) about everything. English lessons involved fetching any random book from his voluminous library and dissecting one page of it. He used to make us taste potassium permanganate to verify that it did indeed have the flavour claimed in the textbook ;-).
At Bell Labs, there were a few people like that. Most often the mathematicians or astronomers like Bob Wilson (who won a Nobel prize for picking up background effects of the Big Bang on that silly old horn antenna up the hill).
It has always confounded me as to why people are reluctant to talk about the things they know about (especially in a non-competitive environment where its not a job security thing!). I guess you are called a geek and boring if you do so. Better to discuss some inane game or movie??
>
> ``I guess more obvious one would be IAS/Princeton in the
> Einstein-Godel period. von who??''
>
> John von Neumann. Inventor of just about everything important in the
> 20thC. Should have been at Berkeley. Died of leukemia in 1957, a good
> twenty years before his time. A real sucker for ivy league prestige...
>
Yes, it was von Neumann I was referring to... I was being sarcastic about the very point you bring up in your response: invented just about everything important in the 20th C. Perhaps so, but inventions are boring and too practical, when compared to discoveries. And there are so many wonderful mathematicians to choose from in that period (among them Gödel himself)...
--ravi
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