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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gauguin who wrote (16664)	1/19/1999 7:28:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

The singularly most absent-minded smart guy I ever saw was a math teacher at college. You know the type - finer-boned than a bird, enormous balding head, and tended to do one thing to the exclusion of all else. Once he fell off the stage. The incident I remember was when one of the students asked him to walk him through a fairly easy homework problem. Prof says - "Oh. That's an easy one." He takes chalk, whips out E-A S, thinks for at least five seconds, comes to a decision and adds a Y. He writes the starting expression on the board. A coupla steps in - he drops a sign. Tiny little thing. A lot of us see this and raise our hands, make polite noises even, but his Universe is now the blackboard. The dropped sign turns an easy one into Fermat's last theorem. Prof runs the math with clockwork precision, filling the board with bigger, uglier formulae every minute. Time passes - indeed the buzzer rings. We've done this for fifty minutes. Prof shouts in pure disgust (something like) "Well just work it out for yourself, it really isn't hard." Sad thing is - this guy was bona-fide brilliant but couldn't dress himself.