A young woman said to her doctor, 'You have to help me, I hurt all over.' 'What do you mean?' said the doctor. The woman touched her right knee with her index finger and yelled,'Ow, that hurts.' Then she touched her left cheek and again yelled, 'Ouch! That hurts, too.' Then she touched her right earlobe. 'Ow, even THAT hurts.' The doctor asked the woman, 'Are you a natural blonde?' 'Why yes,' she said. 'I thought so,' said the doctor. 'You have a sprained finger.'
Adrien-Marie LegendreBorn 18 Sep 1752; died 9 Jan 1833 at age 80. French mathematician who contributed to number theory, celestial mechanics and elliptic functions. In 1794, he was put in charge of the French government's department that was standardizing French weights and measures. In 1813, he took over as head of the Bureau des Longitudes upon the death of Lagrange, its former chief. It was in a paper on celestial mechanics concerning the motion of planets (1784) that he first introduced the Legendre Polynomials. His provided outstanding work on elliptic functions (1786), and his classic treatise on the theory of numbers (1798) and also worked on the method of least squares.«[DSB gives date of death 9 Jan 1833. EB gives 10 Jan 1833.] |
