Re: Friedman on Markowitz

From: Mark Taranto
Affiliation:
Address: MarkTaranto@comcast.net
Date: 29 Nov 2006
Time: 13:32:46

Comments

The Russell/Moore/Witgenstein story is related in Ronald Clark's biography of Russell -- which I haven't looked at in 20 years. I spent tw years of my life studying this kind of philosophy. While I think of it as time well spent, I rarely look back. your story reminded me of something I had heard back in the mid 1970s -- but it had a different result. As I heard it there was a teenage phenom who graduated college at 14. By the time he was 18, he had written a thesis on a new area of mathematics that he created called "supercontinuous functions." His thesis defined them and proved all manner of theorems about it. In the version I heard, he became the youngest ever math professor at Princeton and continued to publish article after article on supercontinuous functions. Then the bubble burst -- someone proved the theorem that stated that all supercontinuous functins are linear. The story didn't say anything about whether or not he had tenure yet. It may be apochryphal -- but there are lots of horror stories. One of my undergraduate professors never finished his thesis because both times that he got close, someone else published his result. I feel for him -- I had to throw away one of my dissertation papers for the same reason.

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