Procrastinating on Wikipedia and found this…

elodieunderglass:

heliophile-oxon:

thousandmaths:

So there’s a pretty long tradition in math of people coming up with problems they can’t solve, and talking to their friends, and realizing that nobody they know can solve them either, and then announcing to the world that you would get some sort of prize if someone could solve them. 

Usually the prize is a small amount of money.

Sometimes, if someone is really cocky, or the problem is known to be really hard, it’s a lot of money. 

And sometimes there’s Stanisław Mazur, who offered a live goose as a prize for finding a particularly pathological object (a Banach space for which some compact operator is not the limit of finite-rank operators). 

And then, Per Enflo did manage to find such an object. Today, there is photographic evidence that he did, in fact, receive his prize. Go look at that picture, and tell me that Enflo is not 100% pumped about his goose. The older Mazur, on the other hand, looks mostly like “WTF, this fool actually called my bluff”.

The photograph is a delight. @elodieunderglass I cannot but suspect that this intersection of mathematics and geese may speak to you.

image

“The construction of a Banach space without the approximation property earned Per Enflo a live goose in 1972, which had been promised by  Stanisław Mazur (left) in 1936.”

WHEN will my field finally award me my rightful GOOSE

(via curiosamathematica)

Source: thousandmaths