curmudgeon

The Boy’s Own Paper, I believe) about a certain Hindu calculator who in exactly two seconds could find the seventeenth root of, say [here follows a 40-decimal-digit number] (I am not sure if I have got this right; anyway the root was 212.)”

 

The remarkable thing here is that the numbers are correct: the 40-digit number is indeed (212)^ 17. More remarkable is that Nabokov claims to have remembered the numbers from a fleeting childhood event some 40 years previously. (In passing, Underwood Dudley, who knows some of the tricks of the calculating prodigies, tells me that knowing in advance that a given number is in fact the exact 17th power of some integer really simplifies finding its 17th root! You readily estimate the range of x from log (x^ 17) = 17logx = log(N). But that leaves the amazing task for most of us to mentally calculate 17 powers.) Nabokov is not claiming to have calculated anything, but had he lied he need only have remembered 212 and 17 and then computed 212^ 17 for his memoirs. This is most unlikely, as is the possibility that his copy of Boy’s Own Paper survived the 1917 Revolution and the Nabokov family’s subsequent odysseys in Germany, France, and England.

And yet, the more I learn of his life, works, and remarkable brain, the less inclined am I to doubt his word. He suffered (or enjoyed) synesthesia, so he “saw” words, letters, and numbers as colored images. He composed his novels on index cards, and at a certain point had the complete work fixed in his mind. So, if your exposure to Nabokov has been limited to his controversial Lolita (or the movies “they dared not make!”), perhaps the Pale Fire mystery might help widen your horizons. It may perhaps improve your IT career opportunities by sharpening your deductive and word power. Maybe not! Who cares? We’ll all be on the dole until the recession ends at 6: 12 a.m. GMT on September 15, 2014 (you read it here first).

As that most annoying of adverts says, “Make the Most of NOW!” (I can never recall the product. I just rush at time’s moving target, missing one NOW after the next.) Relax with Pale Fire. It’s full of laughs, just like my title! As Jeremy Paxman says on the UK game show, University Challenge, “Here’s your starter for 10. Which unfinished 999-line poem begins:

 

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane”?

No conferring!

My quiz this month (usual invaluable prizes): Boyer’s law states that “mathematical laws, formulae, and theorems are usually not named after their original discoverers.” Who was the first to enunciate this law? Q

REFERENCES

1. This now-dated slur, I hate to clarify for non-Brits, involves the sad and unfair decline in prestige suffered by certain higher-educational establishments set up in the UK for “vocational” rather than “academic” training. While remaining treasured in France and many other countries, the poly in the UK has been so stigmatized as inferior to its elitist rivals that a truly British solution has been mandated: the polytechnics have been renamed as universities!

2. Unlike coolth, which has been attested dialectically since the 16th century, dumbth is yet to be widely blessed in the dictionaries, in spite of Steve Allen’s coinage and a book of that title (Dumbth: The Lost Art of Thinking, Prometheus Books), circa 1996. Allen tries to separate the facts that most people ought to know but occasionally don’t know through sheer accident, and those facts or logical steps in reasoning that really, really are so damned widely known and obvious that dumbth rather than ignorance is the only natural explanation. Some of Allen’s examples are borderline, however. A classic gotcha is: “Fancy not knowing that Gregory Peck played the title-role in Moby Dick.” It’s more likely to catch out those who do know the actor and the movie, but are temporarily confused by the meaning of “title-role!”

 

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STAN KELLY-BOOTLE ( http://www.feniks.com/skb/; http:// www.sarcheck.com), born in Liverpool, England, read pure mathematics at Cambridge in the 1950s before tackling the impurities of computer science on the pioneering EDSAC I. His many books include The Devil’s DP Dictionary ( McGraw-Hill, 1981), Understanding Unix (Sybex, 1994), and the recent e-book Computer Language—The Stan Kelly-Bootle Reader. Software Development Magazine has named him as the first recipient of the new annual Stan Kelly-Bootle Eclectech Award for his “lifetime achievements in technology and letters.” Neither Nobel nor Turing achieved such prized eponymous recognition. Under his nom-de-folk, Stan Kelly, he has enjoyed a parallel career as a singer and songwriter. He can be reached at curmudgeon@acmqueue.com. © 2009 ACM 1542-7730 /09/0200 $5.00