John Edensor Littlewood fue un matemático británico, conocido principalmente por su larga colaboración con G. H. Hardy, así como por haber refutado una conjetura que haría Carl Friedrich Gauss acerca de la sobreestimación del logaritmo integral con respecto a la cantidad de números primos menores que un N dado. Wikipedia
“The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it--would.”
Note quotation marks: Littlewood is repeating a joke without attribution. "Cross-purposes, Unconscious Assumptions, Howlers, Misprints, etc.", p. 59.
Littlewood's Miscellany (1986)
(about Ramanujan) p. lvii of [Hardy, G. H., G. H. Hardy, Obituary Notices: Srinivasa Ramanujan, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 19, xl-lviii, 1921, http://www.numbertheory.org/obituaries/LMS/ramanujan/index.html, 2008-05-26]
"Cross-purposes, Unconscious Assumptions, Howlers, Misprints, etc.", p. 61.
Littlewood's Miscellany (1986)
Harald Bohr, [Harald Bohr, Collected Mathematical Works, 1, 1952, Dansk Matematisk Forening, Copenhagen, 3172542, xiii-xxxiv, Looking Backward], p. xxvii
About
“A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.”
"Introduction to A Mathematician's Miscellany", p. 24.
Littlewood's Miscellany (1986)
"Academic Life", p. 135.
Littlewood's Miscellany (1986)
