The owner of a company tells his employees, “You worked very hard this year, therefore the company’s profits increased dramatically. As a reward, I'm giving everyone a check for $5,000!”
Thrilled, the employees gather round and high five one another.
“And if you work with the same zeal next year, I'll sign those checks!”
Salomon BochnerDied 2 May 1982 at age 82 (born 20 Aug 1899). Salomon Chaim Bochner was a Galician-American mathematician and educator who is remembered for his Bochner theorem of positive-definite functions and the Bochner integral. In the later development of abstract Fourier analysis, the Bochner theorem was basic to the theory of distributions. He started his academic career in Germany. In 1933, as a Jew, with the rise of the Nazism, he fled to the U.S., where he joined the faculty at Princeton. In addition to his life-long interest in harmonic analysis, in his prolific writings, Bochner also contributed significantly to complex analysis, differential geometry, probability and other pioneering work in pure mathematics. In his later years, he turned almost exclusively to the history and philosophy of science. His best-known book, The Role of Mathematics in the Rise of Science (1966), was translated into many languages.« |
