It's Friday!!!

Sigh... it's never good when on the ride up the elevator to work, the only though going through your head is "so when is it going to be 5pm already so I can go home." Not a good sign.

Anway, I hope you all had a great 4th of July. I spent it up on the roof of Ilana's building watching the fireworks, after spending the rest of the day walking to Georgetown and getting completely soaked by the rain. Interestingly, while the fireworks on the mall only lasted for about half an hour, there were still fireworks going on an hour after the DC ones finished.

Tonight I'm going to Shabbat dinner with the gesher city Shabbat cluster in my area, and then I'm going to be going to New York City on Saturday to see Kiri (my little sister) who is currently doing some summer program or other up at Barnard.

Anyway, back to work... ill have some more posts later about this weeks comics, more about the 4th and some other stuff.

Ta for now
-yonatan

Uncle Max

Wow... now my Great Uncle Max, who died while I was in middle school was reportedly a great mathematician. We heard tales of his working with Albert Einstein, and of his high position in the Mathematics Department at Stanford.

Until now, I had never seen any evidence of his existence, and only one person I have ever met (outside of family) has ever known who he was.

But as I was looking up stuff for one of those "tagged" posts, which i will post later, when a simple Google search, which had never produced anything before, struck gold.

His full name was Menahem Max Schiffer.
He was born in Berlin in 1911 and studied under none other that Erwin Schrödinger (as in Schrödinger 's cat.) It was he who pushed Uncle Max into mathematics.

I don't know if I can thing about this any more..but this is just amazing...

Here is a link to a memorial resolution from the Academic Council on Stanford about him.

Oh and here is the links to the books that he wrote, as presented by Amazon

Ast, Keeks, look at this stuff...