macleod@drivax.UUCP (06/04/87)
The Tale of the Smart Man
I thought I would tell this story to entertain you, but I also
hope that somebody can identify the actual person mentioned in
this story. He must be out there, somewhere, in the scientific
community.
Once upon a time, I was sitting with my friends Chuck and Dan
around Dan's table in his house in Pacific Grove. We all used to
work at Digital Research, but Dan had returned to teaching at the
Naval Postgraduate School.
(Dan has two doctorates, in computer science and in mathematics,
from Caltech. Number theory won his heart, so now he's part of
that small, eccentric community. He worked with Gary Kildall
[anybody remember him? Didn't think so...] and helped start
Digital Research, back when Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth... in
addition, Dan is one of the most admirable men I've ever known -
thoughtful, moral, tough, and genuinely modest.)
Chuck and I were sitting around sort of congratulating each other
on how bright we all were, how smart we were to have risen to the
top of things, and like that. Dan sat there thinking to himself.
Chuck and I looked to him for some agreement. Dan said, traces
of his West Texas drawl outlining his words, that he thought that
everybody was just about equal in the smarts department. "Go
on!" we said, "You can't be serious..."
"No, I mean it...well, maybe there was one guy I knew...I guess
you could call him a genius..."
With this buildup, Chuck and I sat there eagerly. Dan told us
a story something like this...
"When I came out from Georgia Tech to Caltech to study Math there
were only four others in the doctoral program, and we had a
number of advisors. One of my advisors was (a woman whose name I
forget, but who Dan later described as "probably the finest female
mathematician in the country"), and the other was Everett (last name
lost). I surely loved the atmosphere there. You could go down into
the cafeteria and sit around and argue with Richard Feynmann and
half a dozen other Nobel laureates. Sometimes Everett was there, too.
You know, no matter what anybody brought up, he knew something
about it. You name it - the way Porsche specially crystallizes
the piston sleeve metal in their engines, the reason for the explosion
of the armoury in Delft that killed Karel Fabritus (a peer of Vermeer),
the modulus of elasticity of golf balls, the politics of the
Electors of Burgundy...you name it, he usually knew more than
anybody else about it.
"But that was just casual conversation...when it came to his
specialties...you know, most mathematicians specialize in one
subject or other; the field is so large that just keeping up with
one segment is enough for one man...but Everett knew >more< about
>EVERY< branch of mathematics than anybody else in the Caltech math
department. But he especially liked number theory...every year there
was this conference that he went to, and there was this
mathematician who flew in each year from Europe. He's go up to
Everett and say, 'Last year you told me to pursue the X postulate...
I did, and I found out Y and Z', and Everett would look off into
space and say, 'Try A and B.' and the fellow would fly back to
Europe and spend a whole year working on that suggestion.
"The other grad students and I would work on some project for
two or three months, and they we'd bring Everett a folder of
papers with our results. He would just flip through the pages,
assimilating instantly what took us months to do, while
remarking, "Hmm...looks good. Yes...but this was anticipated by
Tillerman in '67...see Anspach's paper from '81 at the Nederland
Group meeting...yes...why don't you try A, B, and C...' We'd go
off and it would take us a week just to figure out the
significance of the direction he pointed us in..."
"Then there were times we thought we'd caught him out wrong. But he
never was. I mean he >never< was wrong. In the five years I
worked with him there, he was never wrong about >anything<. I saw
him write countless programs. They always ran perfectly the
first time; they never had any bugs.
"Then there was the time I was giving a presentation and Everett
got this vague look on his face and stared out the window. I was
really worried but I kept going. It turned out that something I said
led him to invent a whole new branch of mathematics on the spot..
"Last I heard he had married one of his grad students and went off
to the Sorbonne for a while..."
Since I heard Dan's story, I've always wondered what happened to
Everett, the Smart Man. You'd think that such a man, the peer of
a Goethe or Gauss, would be changing the face of our world. Can
you tell us anything about this man, or others like him?