One time, Feynman was giving a lecture to some middle-school kids. He used the date of some battle as an example, but he got it a bit wrong and the kids immediately corrected him. He laughed and said "Hey! 3 significant digits is pretty good for a theoretical physicist!"
A teacher asks a group of students to prove that all odd numbers above 1 are prime numbers. After a short while the students begin arguing about the best proof.
Mathematician: "We should use proof by induction, I can show 3 is a prime number by listing all of it's factors, and then from there I can show that 2n + 1 is prime ..."
Scientist: "What? that doesn't make any sense. What we need is experimental data. Let's collect enough points, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13. Six points should do, now look, the general trend is that all of them are prime. We have one anomaly, but it's probably just caused by a random fluctuation in..."
Engineer: "Nah, all this theory is pointless, we only need to know if they are prime in the real world. Let's just take a few and see if they work for our purposes. 3 - prime, 5 - prime, 7 - prime, 9 - nearly prime, 11 - prime, surely that's good enough."
Computer scientist: "While you lot have been wasting your time arguing I have been writing a program that will do all the work for us"
All of the students gather around the CS's computer and watch as he presses go.
Computer:
3 is prime
3 is prime
3 is prime
3 is prime
3 is prime
3 is prime
3 is prime
3 is prime
3 is prime
3 is prime
3 is prime
3 is prime
3 is prime
3 is prime
3 is prime
3 is prime
This whole thread is messed up because it
has never even mentioned the whole other
half of the subject as in the famous
monograph, A Short Table of Even Primes.
