Thứ Tư, 10 tháng 3, 2021

There once was a mathematician.

He made it his life’s goal to tackle one of the greatest unsolved calculus problems in history. For months he worked, filling blackboards with numbers and lines, to no avail.

After a year of struggling, he was ready to give up. He pulled out the bottle of wine that was meant to toast his success, popped the cork and poured a glass.

After drinking it half way, he stood staring at his work, just hoping for some glimpse of clarity. On finishing his glass, he found a typo in an equation, and cautiously corrected it. He poured another glass.

Halfway through the second, he noticed another transcription error and fixed it. Was this finally working? Finish the glass, pour another.

4 or 8 glasses later, and everything is working! Chalk flying, numbers matching, equations balancing, heart pounding! He was doing it! It all made sense! Visions of Nobel prizes and speeches floated through his mind as he put the final touches on his magnum opus.

He sauntered down the hall that night victorious, called an Uber and rode home as the new king of calculus.

The next day, he caught a bus to work, anxious to document his finest work. He arrived to find... chaos. Some of the numbers... not even numbers. For some reason he had circled a number and wrote “threeve?” There were smily faces and rude drawings.

It was drivel. The mad scribbles of an intoxicated and desperate man. All hope of fame and fortune fell helplessly to the ground.

And that’s when he knew, it was true what they say.

Never drink and derive.

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