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General: That was a little odd

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    • CommentAuthorWill Jagy
    • CommentTimeAug 11th 2010 edited
     
    I just got a call from a reporter for the (Berkeley) campus Daily Californian, asking what it is like to contribute to MO. She had evidently spoken to Anton earlier, that may have been in person. I answered what little she seemed to want to know about. I suggested she find a tame undergraduate math major and watch as a random question was posted, I'm not convinced she will do that...It should not be difficult to post a link to the eventual article in some thread here.

    I forgot the good bit. When I asked why me, she indicated that everybody else was off doing something in India.

    I feel so special.
    • CommentAuthorVP
    • CommentTimeAug 11th 2010
     

    Hey, I am not in India! But not in Berkeley, either...

    • CommentAuthorWill Jagy
    • CommentTimeAug 11th 2010
     
    She asked about you, I told her you were too important to bother.

    Also Felipe Voloch.
    • CommentAuthorvoloch
    • CommentTimeAug 12th 2010
     
    I'm too important to bother? Now, I feel special! BTW I'm not travelling, I'm just on the couch surfing the web on my iPod because I'm too lazy to retrieve and boot up my laptop.
    • CommentAuthorWill Jagy
    • CommentTimeAug 12th 2010
     
    Felipe, if your fingers can reach the keypad of the iPod again in your current weakened state, I wound up asking whether there were any instances of a polynomial in only one variable, integer coefficient and degree at least two, that has been proved to represent infinitely many primes. Gerry thought not. What do you think? Note that, from Victor's comment, primes $x^3 + y^3$ are in fact $3 k^2 - 3 k + 1 $ which is why the question came to mind.

    The dollar signs don't seem to do anything here. We are powerless, adrift at sea.
  6.  
    Will---no such polynomial is known---not one example. On the other hand it's conjectured that every polynomial that doesn't obviously fail will work.
    • CommentAuthorWill Jagy
    • CommentTimeAug 12th 2010
     
    Thanks, Kevin. That is exactly the situation I would have guessed. But I suspect the only discussion I have ever seen is of x^2 + 1 and I do not remember where I saw that off MO, other than places mentioned on MO for that purpose (OEIS), nothing on paper.
    • CommentAuthorvoloch
    • CommentTimeAug 12th 2010
     
    • CommentAuthorWill Jagy
    • CommentTimeAug 12th 2010
     
    Thanks, Felipe. That page had a link to Schinzel's Hypothesis H, which is not so much an ointment for the relief of itching in the posterior regions as it is a conjecture on the representation of primes by polynomials. The only answer given to my farcical consecutive numbers question was a demonstration that H implies the easier part of my question, posted by Powerpuff, who came back on August 2 and commented that H also implies my strongest conjecture,
    http://mathoverflow.net/questions/23943/

    Now I'm glad I checked.

    I see, Powerpuff did register as I asked, number 8078.
    Could somebody please merge the Powerpuff accounts 8078 and 8063 ?
    • CommentAuthorvoloch
    • CommentTimeAug 13th 2010
     
  11.  

    Nice article. I like the last quote: "MathOverflow is meant to be a little corner of the Internet for professional mathematicians."

    • CommentAuthorWill Jagy
    • CommentTimeAug 13th 2010
     
    Thanks for posting it, Felipe. I did not realize she was in that much of a hurry. As to her choice of one impression to report out of the areas I tried to explain to her, that one isn't bad. I remember she was impressed with the 81 answers I had as of yesterday, it made me realize she had not looked up any individual user in the MO profiles, otherwise she would have found hundreds of answers by some.
  13.  

    For a short, rapidly written article, it seems quite good to me. +5 for not using using either "geek" or "whiz".

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