Monday, March 07, 2011

Conway, Diaconis, Rivest I've Heard Of - But Who's That Fourth Guy?

In this reminiscence about the late Martin Gardner, Donald Knuth points out that Gardner had correspondence with some young mathematicians who later became famous: John Conway, Persi Diaconis, Ron Rivest, and some fourth guy no one's ever heard of.

Well, it's nice to be mentioned in that famous company.

5 comments:

Larry Moran said...

That's quite a compliment. You should be proud.

jellybean said...

Indeed. A mention from Donald Knuth should make anyone feel proud.

Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said...

Excellent, Jeffrey!

To add a somewhat off-topic item to your famage here, I should inform everyone that you are the critical link in my low Erdös number of 4.

~~ Paul

George said...

That is very cool! What was the nature of your letters to Martin Gardner?

I am happy to have corresponded with Martin myself. Only it was about four years ago regarding the game of Chinese Checkers. He was always very meticulous about keeping his correspondences up. In this modern age, standards have really slipped, I'm afraid. Soon all we will be able to do is utter IM speak-like grunts.

KeithB said...

Or comment on blogs. 8^)