Harry Truman was known for his blunt manner of speaking. When he made a speech at the Washington Garden Club, he kept referring to the "good manure" that needed to be used on the flowers.
Some society women complained to his wife, Bess. "Couldn't you get the President to say 'fertilizer'?" they asked.
Mrs. Truman replied, "Heavens, no! It took me twenty-five years to get him to say 'manure.'"
Srinivasa RamanujanBorn 22 Dec 1887; died 26 Apr 1920 at age 32. Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician who did notablework on hypergeometric series and continued fractions. In number theory, he discovered properties of the partition function. Although self-taught, he was one of India's greatest mathematical geniuses. He worked on elliptic functions, continued fractions, and infinite series. His remarkable familiarity with numbers, was shown by the following incident. While Ramanujan was in hospital in England, his Cambridge professor, G. H. Hardy, visited and remarked that he had taken taxi number 1729, a singularly unexceptional number. Ramanujan immediately responded that this number was actually quite remarkable: it is the smallest integer that can be represented in two ways by the sum of two cubes: 1729=13+123=93+103.« |
