A 6th-grade teacher posed the following problem to one of her arithmetic classes:
“A wealthy man dies and leaves ten million dollars.
One-fifth is to go to his wife, one-fifth is to go to his son, one-sixth to his butler, and the rest to charity.
Now, what does each get?”
After a very long silence in the classroom, one little boy raised his hand.
With complete sincerity in his voice, answered, “A lawyer!”
Johann Elert BodeDied 23 Nov 1826 at age 79 (born 19 Jan 1747).German astronomer best known for his popularization of Bode's law. In 1766, his compatriot Johann Titius had discovered a curious mathematical relationship in the distances of the planets from the sun. If 4 is added to each number in the series 0, 3, 6, 12, 24,... and the answers divided by 10, the resulting sequence gives the distances of the planets in astronomical units (earth = 1). Also known as the Titius-Bode law, the idea fell into disrepute after the discovery of Neptune, which does not conform with the 'law' - nor does Pluto. Bode was director at the Berlin Observatory, where he published Uranographia (1801), one of the first successful attempts at mapping all stars visible to the naked eye without any artistic interpretation of the stellar constellation figures. |
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