A man who forgot about his own wedding

For whomever might be interested in anectodes about mathematicians' personal lives:

My girlfriend's family was related to https://planetmath.org/kallevaisala and she told me this story which was part of the family lore. The family and friends were having some kind of get-together celebration maybe a wedding or so and prof. Vaisala's wife had bought him a brand new suit to look good for the occasion.

During the party they were playing croquet in the garden and prof. Vaisala got really into the game, but had the realization that suit-pants may not be the best for playing croquet. He could have stuffed the end of his pant-legs into his socks but that didn't really work, maybe socks were too tight and pants too big. So, he found a pair of scissors somewhere, and cut his pant-legs short. His wife started crying. She didn't really appreciate the genius of mathematicians.

Reminds me of the story about Weiner, who forgot he moved.

Apparently a true story, but the version where he also didn’t recognize his daughter (waiting for him at his previous home to show him to the new one) was an embellishment; at his funeral, his daughter said “dad never forgot who his children were”.

Historical footnote:

'What also surprised me in the biography was the striking difference between Jews in Italy and in Poland. [...] Leopold Infeld’s autobiography [...] describes the Jewish ghettos in Poland as being almost completely isolated from the general population. [...] She was utterly surprised when she first saw the Jewish quarter in Warsaw, remarking: “The Jews in side curls and kaftans made me feel that I was living in two different nations.'

I wonder if she was failing to distinguish between various kinds of Jews. Compare the majority of American Jews today, and the Hasidic Jews of Brooklyn, for example. This, too, was the case in Poland, home to the vast majority of the world's Jews at the time. On the one hand, there were a number of assimilated Jews and Poles of Jewish ancestry (like Tarski, Brzechwa Steinhaus, and so on). On the other, there were plenty of religious Jews of a more orthodox strain. And given that 1/3 of the population of Warsaw was Jewish, it would be difficult to imagine otherwise.

I talked to one of Zariski's students about this... He mention to me that the article said he studied ”real” algebraic geometry, which is a different subject —he studied “complex” algebraic geometry as well as algebraic geometry without a limiting adjective.

> On the day he and his fiancée Yole were getting married, with Yole already dressed in white and veiled and the rabbi standing by, the bridegroom was nowhere to be found. It turned out he was working on a mathematical problem. Luckily, Yole was neither angry nor surprised; she was amused. Ha! I need to tell this to my wife.

Fellas and ladies, get yourself a spouse who understands when you're late to your own wedding because you are inspired by your passions.

Nice little story, the bride was not upset. But a interesting read.

      I think it’s difficult for us today to fully grasp the hope that the Russian Revolution brought to the working people.

That hypotheses didn’t workout very well.

This is the plot of flubber with Robin Williams…

I like the post, and I would upvote it if the title was more descriptive of the actual content instead of a clickbait-y "hook" that hints nothing about the topic.

I thought I'd be reading about an interesting neuroscience case (or whatever), but it's a review/short synopsis of a mathematician's biography. The wedding anecdote is just the last paragraph.

The story about the wedding is one short paragraph at the end - with almost no extra information and not referenced elsewhere in the article. Very anticlimactic.

> But the story in the book that I liked the most is this one: Zariski was, of course, very much obsessed with mathematics. On the day he and his fiancée Yole were getting married, with Yole already dressed in white and veiled and the rabbi standing by, the bridegroom was nowhere to be found. It turned out he was working on a mathematical problem. Luckily, Yole was neither angry nor surprised; she was amused. Ha! I need to tell this to my wife.

Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is" to quote Ian Banks' "Excession". It's also helpful to characterize a person not just by their character, tenacity or energy, or age, but also a number between 0 and 1 that indicates how much of their time they've spent in the real world, vs in their happy fun space. Call it the "imagination factor". A bright, capable mind of 40 with an imagination factor of .75 may only have the cumulative real-world experience of a 10-year-old.

Headline should be "Oscar Zariski - forgot about his own wedding" in accordance with HN headline guidelines.

These anecdotes not only humanize these brilliant minds but also offer a humorous and endearing look at the quirks that often accompany such intense intellectual focus.