I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Ecclesiastes 9:11

Forest manager gives a math talk - profs suspect nothing



Berezovsky is giving a talk in 2002 fiction film Tycoon (Oligarch).

Russian oligarch Petr Aven recently published a book on fellow oligarch: The time of Berezovsky. The title of one of its chapters copies the title of my article Berezovsky number. Nonetheless I am not mentioned there by name, only as "one gentleman" (один господин) who wrote that article. This is not surprising since I do not belong to the scientific master race. But I wanted to talk about something else. In the book, Aven gauged Berezovsky's scientific power (my translation):

Boris was a very bad mathematician.

His interviewee, Alexander Gnedin, who in 1980s worked in Berezovsky's laboratory at the Institute of Control Sciences in Moscow, disagreed hinting that Berezovsky was not a mathematician at all (my translation):

What do you mean - "bad"? The man did not have a mathematical education ... He graduated from a College of Forestry.

The level of Berezovsky's ignorance Gnedin described in the following words (my translation):

He could not tell a sine from a cosine.

Next Gnedin tells the following story. In 1987 Berezovsky went on a buiseness trip to the USA. Gnedin suggested him to visit Prof. Steve Samuels at Purdue University and give a talk at a seminar there. Prof. Samuels was a leading specialist on the best choice problem. The same problem Berezovsky and Gnedin wrote a book on. That is Gnedin wrote the book and Berezovsky was paying salary to Gnedin. Just as he wrote the book Gnedin wrote the talk for Berezovsky to deliver at Purdue. After some years Gnedin visited Purdue himself and asked Samuels how was Berezovsky's talk. The answer was: "Absolutely terrific." Prof. Herman Rubin, one of leading American statisticians, began to ask questions, and Berezovsky answered all of them fine. Gnedin concludes the story with the question: "How could this happen?"

Really, how? To understand this, we need to take a broad look at the problem. After all, one gentleman already wrote about a joker who read a meaningless lecture to math students at the leading French university Ecole normale superieure. It turned out absolutely terrific. No one smelled the rat. One student, who later became a well known mathematician, even told his fellow students that he understood this lecture. One gentleman wrote about the researchers from the University of Southern California who hired a Hollywood actor and presented him to the audience as a famous scientist. The luminary read a foolish lecture and answered questions. PhD listeners gave the lecturer the highest marks. One gentleman wrote that scientists do not read the papers they cite, and some of them do not read even the titles of these papers. That's how it happens.

While writing, I recalled a man, who, like Berezovsky, did not know sines and cosines. He was my FAA examiner for Private Pilot License. Apart from actual flying, the exam had a theoretical part. Among other things, one had to compute the wind correction for the heading. I did it using vector algebra and trigonometry. The examiner was amazed, as the other examinees solved the problem using a special calculator for pilots. And I was surprised by the latter, since trigonometry is taught in high school. But it turns out that the Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences would also have to use the special calculator. But I don't think that it could come to this, since one can't convince an airplane by blabber. Famous impostor Abagnale during his criminal career managed to work as a lawyer, a doctor, and a professor of sociology, actually performing job duties. The crook also pretended to be a pilot. That is, dressed in a beautiful pilot uniform, he cashed fake checks and flew for free as a passenger. But he never piloted an airplane.

One gentleman

March 29, 2018

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