Alexander Stoimenow


A Quiz

I seek the identity of a world-famous mathematician, call him Mr. X. Soon after I got to know him, I noticed that he has a big and illustrious family, and started collecting information about various family members. I introduce some of them below, and ask: who is Mr. X?

Historical note: I started this project decades ago, some time in the late 90s. My original intention was (and I like to keep it) to restrict myself to names whose encounter I have some personal memories about (and which give me a certain sense of achievement to have collected them). I aimed to gather about 40 people, but I increasingly realized that, on my predetermined terms and at that time, this length was too hard to attain. Moreover, I saw little priority, which were main reasons why I increasingly lost motivation and abandoned the project. But I kept on coming across interesting people, in particular through the internet. In the meantime, it exploded, and now allows me to find a myriad of others I had never heard about. (Wikipedia has an extra page with a list.) At some point, I decided it is worth taking the project up again, and bringing it to some end. The internet remains a main and indispensable resource, but conforming to my old intention, I restricted myself to personalities I encounter without deliberate search. Even among these, some selection was necessary, in part because I found some too colorful to make the cut. (There were such posing without underwear, or bandites ‐ I mean, true ones, not only people looking so, like the majority of ingenious mathematicians!) Moreover, in order to avoid it getting a lifetime's achievement (it certainly took longer than anything else I've written, yet it is not even comparably as important as most of it), on May 28, 2015 I decided to set the release deadline to end of 2016 (timely for Mr X's birthday) ‐ but with the option to update the list after release. And I tried to speed it up (thanks to Don Regan and, of course, M.m.m. M.M.!). My modest output reached the original goal of 40 on Feb 28, 2016. I also apologise that the descriptions are to a small part a bit outdated. (One famous person who was in quite from the beginning died at the final stretch of the project. May he rest in peace!)

 


Alexander Stoimenow,
stoimeno_stoimenov.net