In 1962 my Uncle, on his maiden visit to Kovur, was being led by my two youngest sisters (9 and 7, hand in hand) to meet my Father in his High School Office. The two kids were lost in their intimate gup shup while my Uncle was lost in his thought.
As they approached a wayside concrete ladder with about ten steps up and then down, the two girls took a wee detour, climbed up the steps and then down, and got back to the main road; my Uncle blindly following them.
Later in the evening, Uncle asked the two kids what was the great point in that detour.
The two kids were aghast and said:
"Sorry Uncle, for a moment we were not aware that you were following us...this is the detour we take on our way to school everyday just for the kick of it...it became a habit!"
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When I shifted to this sprawling twin-city Hyderabad from the placid Campus at KGP, I was at the mercy of our shrewd auto-wallahs. By the very way in which a customer asks them to take him from Place A to Place B, these chaps can make out that the guy is a stranger to the city.
There are two ways of dealing with them:
1. Haggle and agree to a price (generally double the normal).
The advantage of this is that he will take you by the shortest bumpy route via lanes and bylanes.
2. Go by the meter (same double).
The advantage of this is that he will do a contour integration with a spin around the famous lakes.
By using these two judiciously, I got to know my Hyderabad like the back of my palm.
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Talking of contour integration, I found that a brain used to fancy stuff doesn't usually go by the shortest route (like the auto-wallahs of Hyderabad).
Once I had a real integral to evaluate. At that time I had just learned the high-sounding Sommerfeld-Watson Transformation from DB who had learned it from SDM.
So I upgraded the real integral into a complex one, used the fancy S-W Transform and got a good-looking answer with which I was mightily pleased.
As I was showing it to Dr Mrs N of our Math Dept, she took her pen and paper and got the result in five minutes and said that she did it by partial fractions taught in Class XII.
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Once DB had two integrals which had to be evaluated and summed up to give the final result.
DB took two pages each and evaluated them by complex integration and when summed up the result was a cute and pleasing Dirac Delta Function.
He gave the problem as a challenge to his topnotch Project Student Tanmoy who brought the result in two minutes: he summed up the integrals first without evaluating them and found that a simple change of variable gave one of he standard definitions of the Dirac Delta.
Mysterious are the wayward ways of habituated mind.
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Peenuts
The other day there was this news-item with photos in DC.
Three chimps in their wired enclosure in a zoo were seated on chairs with a glass of water each tied in front of them. The glasses were only quarter-full and each glass had a sumptuous peanut floating on its water.
Each of them had a water-dispenser from which they were used to suck and drink their water.
The Scientists expected each chimp to re-invent for himself the famous trick of the clever crow of Aesop (in reverse), suck water from his dispenser, spit it out into his glass till the water level rises to the brim upon which he can pull out his peanut.
Two failed.
The middle one peed into his glass and solved his problem in an absolutely original way.
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