Much of the world is sadly shaking
their heads over the incident in which a economics professor, spotted doing
equations by a “blonde woman in flip-flops” and deemed a terrorist on that
account, was forcibly removed from the plane and sent to Security.
What no one has bothered to reveal,
in all this brouhaha, is the statement by the woman herself. Contacted by the crack WDJ news
team, the woman (a physics professor at a named U.S. university) commented:
“Look, the guy was
setting the integral of the limit as equal to the limit of the integrals -- without insuring uniform
convergence! And the domain of
functional definition wasn’t even compact, for Pete’s sake !! That’s plain loony! I didn’t say he was a terrorist, I said he was an errorist.”
We see. But did that pose a danger to the plane?
“Definitely! The integral threatened to -- as the
saying goes -- ‘blow up’.”
A reader commenting in the German
newspaper Die Welt concurs:
Wenn es sich um
nichtlineare Gl gehandelt hat, könnte die Frau Recht gehabt haben!
 |
| Diverging to infinity, at 33,000 feet |
Happy Mother’s Day.
[Update] The American Mathematical Association has awarded its
prestigious Exceptional Civilian
Service medal to “the Blonde Bimbo in Flip-flops” (as she prefers to be known;
like Andrew Wiles and Grigori Perelman, she shuns the limelight), for forestalling a potentially
catastrophic non-convergent integration,
with effects on cabin pressure that can only be imagined.
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