The San Francisco Chronicle had a story Saturday about a young man in Danville, Evan O’Dorney, who submitted a math solution to become a finalist for the $100,000 Intel Talent search for students. That has sent me back to review the tape Eric Cohen made of his father Paul J. Cohen at the 2006 Godel Centennial in Vienna, Austria.
Regarding his childhood, it was said that when Paul was a kid the librarian in Brooklyn tried to refuse Paul from checking out certain math books in their collection because they did not believe such a young person could possibly understand them.
Beyond being some sort of advisor or noodge to Steve and Eric’s effort to make a film about their father and the solving of “the continuum hypothesis” I also have an idea that it would be interesting to produce a one-man show about mathematicians, perhaps having an actor try to memorize this address and embue it with as much emotional variety as Paul shows here.
Steve and Eric started their film project shortly before Paul’s initial illness; sadly, the film became something of a documentation of his medical decline, rather than about the math per se; I remember accompanying them from one floor of Stanford Hospital to another, Paul being rolled in a bed, and that the camera was rolling as well. He died in March of 2007. Understandably, the sons have let the project sit since then (besides uploading this lecture — seen 15,000 times already; besides helping sort his books and papers, and helping their mother with the estate).
I like the anecodote earlier in this lecture about “whether it is true or not you are going to keep telling it.”
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 