Saturday, August 4, 2012

Sledgehammers & Peas

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My Grannie entered her mom-in-law's kitchen at the age of 12:


http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2009/11/autocrat-of-dining-floor.html

Their household then had no less than 20 members...relatives, friends and guests...at any point of time. And Grannie became an expert cook by and by. But when she grew into her sixties and everyone of her kids got married and left her, and her husband and she alone were left in their sumptuous home, she had to employ a cook not because she was too old and infirm but because she couldn't cook for two, no way...the scale was different. A huge pot and kadai on a blast-furnace can handsomely make up errors and approximations...


A tigress stalking a wild buffalo three times its size can hamstring and kill it in two minutes; but is helpless in swatting a fly landing on her nose...the equipment is different.


One summer in my small town, Gudur, I had a severe stomach infection caused by drinking an old and stale bottle of soft drink...it was so hot that I didn't care for its taste. And was promptly admitted into the best nursing home in an AC-room with attached bath and non-stop water and power supply...it was heaven. But its old and expert GP had retired by then and his young MS son-in-law took over making an equally great name for himself. I didn't know that he was a vascular surgeon. He kept me there for a whole week on unending saline and one tiny tablet of chloramphenicol every morning. It needed my MBBS B-i-L in Madurai to ring him up and ask him to add one small bottle of metrogyl in the drip. I recovered immediately and was discharged the next day.

And then this story of a friend of mine at KGP who wanted to undergo vasectomy and chose Dr Kohili, the Chief of the BNR Hospital and a renowned railway surgeon:
 
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2012/07/hypocratic-oath.html


But Dr Kohili and his anesthetist had never done such a simple procedure before and messed it up thoroughly.


Once my friend E F Taylor of MIT and I landed in what looked like a messy indefinite integral that needed to be urgently cracked. EFT gave it up since it was not found in his bulky Table of Integrals. And I didn't even try. My son then was in his First Year at IIT KGP and was boasting he could do any integral that didn't have special functions...he was coached by Dr Mrs NP for his JEE. And I gave it to him and he took only ten minutes and a couple of substitutions to get the answer...and won a handsome Acknowledgment in our Solutions Manual for Taylor & Wheeler's Black Holes Book.


Talking of integrals, I once did an integral by applying the Sommerfeld-Watson Transformation that I learned from DB. And showed it to Dr Mrs NP. And in two minutes she did it by partial fractions, a thing she was teaching her Class XII students. My pleasure knew no bounds when I discovered later on that this very same integral was done by the S-W Transformation in a paper in JMP by a famous physicist.


Here is more about real and complex integrals from Feynman:


'One thing I never did learn was contour integration. I had learned to do integrals by various methods shown in a book that my high school physics teacher Mr. Bader had given me....


....One time I boasted, "I can do by other methods any integral anybody else needs contour integration to do."


So Paul (Olum) puts up this tremendous damn integral he had obtained by starting out with a complex function that he knew the answer to, taking out the real part of it and leaving only the complex part. He had unwrapped it so it was only possible by contour integration! He was always deflating me like that. He was a very smart fellow...'


In our time (the 1960s) it was acknowledged that Landau was the expert physicist in contour integration.

Finally there is this Telugu proverb:

One Farmer takes his son who was bitten by a scorpion to the best Sanskrit Pundit in their village. And when the Pundit expresses his helplessness in the matter, the Farmer exclaims:


"Such a renowned Pundit!...And you don't know the scorpion mantra!"

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