Bloody Stupid Johnson Award — Response
I am honoured beyond my wildest dreams — way beyond my wildest dreams — to be the first — and, I am hugely confident, the last — recipient of the Bloody Stupid Johnson Award for Innovative Use of Mathematics. It is a moment in my career that I shall never forget. However hard I try.
Bergholt Stuttley Johnson has long been one of my heroes, for his creative use of radical techniques to solve problems in landscaping, architecture, and musical instruments such as the sorting machine at Ankh-Morpork Post Office (intended to be an organ and constructed with rotating gears in which he took pi to be exactly three, for tidiness). Other triumphs include the inch-high Collossus of Morpork, Mad Lord Snapcase’s cruet set (families live in it and part is a grain silo), and the fifty-foot deep hoho (like a haha only funnier) and the exploding sundial in the grounds of the Patrician’s Palace. Architecture and mathematics have long gone hand in hand (and possibly considerably further, though I wouldn’t care to speculate). Here on Roundworld Sir Christopher Wren was an accomplished mathematician: in 1658, he found the arc length of a cycloid using an exhaustion proof based on dissections to reduce the |
problem to summing segments of chords of a circle which are in geometric progression... as you are no doubt aware. Buckminster Fuller is justifiably renowned for his reinvention of the truncated icosahedron, which you will all recall was used to such great effect in the American Pavilion at the International and Universal Exposition in Montreal in 1967. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier, based his designs on Fibonacci numbers, which he said “resound in Man by an organic inevitability”. I once stayed in a hotel he’d designed, and the shower was too small.
BSJ was also known by his catchphrases “It might look a bit messy now but just you come back in five hundred year’s time” and “Look, the plans were the right way round when I drew them”. As Turtle Recall recalls — turtlely — “Some of the creations for which he’ll be remembered must surely have taken considerable skill. It was just not the right skill,” and “he was relentlessly cheerful in the face of endless disappointment.” It would be hard to find a more accurate description of what it is like to be a research mathematician.
BSJ was also known by his catchphrases “It might look a bit messy now but just you come back in five hundred year’s time” and “Look, the plans were the right way round when I drew them”. As Turtle Recall recalls — turtlely — “Some of the creations for which he’ll be remembered must surely have taken considerable skill. It was just not the right skill,” and “he was relentlessly cheerful in the face of endless disappointment.” It would be hard to find a more accurate description of what it is like to be a research mathematician.