Talk:George Pólya
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page. | ||
| Start | This article has been rated as Start-Class on the project's quality scale. [FAQ] | ||
 |
This article is supported by the Science and academia work group. | ||
Whoever copy&pasted this forgot to convert the references. What does (1957) stand for? How to Solve It is from 1945.
[edit] pi
How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics. (This is a mnemonic for the first fourteen digits of π, the lengths of the words are the digits)
At the risk of quibbling, that's the first fifteen digits of π, including the first fourteen decimal places. (And the last digit is the same in this case whether rounded or truncated, which we perhaps should say.)
...but the point is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer... - Tom Lehrer, New Math.
Or am I missing something? I'll come back and fix it after a few days. Andrewa 21:41, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
It is the first fifteen digits so I changed it to read 'fifteen'. Logical, no? Mikekelly 16:31, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Categories
"George Pólya's parents were Anna Deutsch and Jakab Pólya who were both Jewish." [1] Obviously, that makes him ethnically Jewish.--20.138.246.89 10:39, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
There is no such thing as an "ethnic Jew", if that is a yes-or-no category. "Ethnicity" is a dicey word that people sometimes used to mean "race"; Judaism is not a race. If "ethnicity" is used properly, then it is a somewhat vague moniker for conglomerates of language and culture; it makes no sense to catalogue X or Y as being of the Z ethnicity (or not).
There is religion and there is status under Jewish law. Under the first criterion, Polya was not Jewish; under the latter he was. More importantly, Judaism was not a part of his background and formative experiences - his status in the eyes of the Nazis (yet another category) hit him only later. Bellbird 13:48, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Incorrect quote
I'm fairly sure the quote is meant to be If you can't solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can't solve: find it. not If you can't solve a problem, then there is an easier problem you can solve: find it. I've changed in accordingly. See http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Polya.html (Alexwright 15:43, 22 February 2007 (UTC))
I just changed it again to "can solve", as I thought it was a mistake. I'll check next week in the book, to finally settle the matter! Tomixdf 18:11, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
