The Priest was preparing a man for his long day's journey into night. Whispering firmly, the Priest said, "Denounce the devil! Let him know how little you think of him!"
The dying man said nothing.
The priest repeated his order.
Still the man said nothing.
The priest asked, "Why do you refuse to denounce the devil and his evil?"
The dying man said, "Until I know for sure where I'm heading, I don't think I ought to aggravate anybody."
Efim Isaakovich ZelmanovBorn 7 Sep 1955.Russian mathematician who was awarded the 1994 Fields Medal for his work on combinatorial problems in nonassociative algebra and group theory and particularly his solution of the Restricted Burnside problem. His Ph.D. (1980) Ph.D. thesis was on nonassociative algebra, wherein his treatment extending results from the classical theory of finite dimensional Jordan algebras to infinite dimensional Jordan algebras. In 1887, he showed that the Engel identity for Lie algebras implies nilpotence, in the previously unsolved case of infinite dimensions. The Restricted Burnside problem that he solved was a narrower condition arising out of Burnside's 1902 question whether a finitely generated group in which every element has finite order, is finite.« |
