Mystery solved! August 22, 2011
Posted by Ben Webster in Uncategorized.trackback
Quite a while ago, Scott posted about spotting some out of place mathematics in an ad for (very) high-end watches. There was a certain amount of speculation in comments about who was involved, but the real culprit outed himself on the alg-top list. While a lot of guesses were based on some references in the ad copy to a “Cambridge University professor,” I suppose we should have remembered that non-academics are completely incapable of distinguishing between different academic ranks. According to his CV, the mathematician in question, Carl McTague, was actually a Cambridge grad student at the time.
In his email, he says he’ll tell the story if bought a drink (at least by subscribers of the mailing list), but perhaps he’ll be willing to write something for those of us who don’t go to Bonn all that often.
Another fun “math formulas in the background of media” incident was the Law&Order:SVU episode where there was a murder at a school for super gifted kids. Each kid got interviewed in a classroom appropriate to their subject, and one of the kids was in a math classroom. Even a brief glance at the background suggested that this was likely to be someone at Columbia, but this was before I’d moved here so I didn’t know who the culprit was until I got here and asked around.