John von Neumann was in the audience at a physics talk. The speaker
had put up a slide showing some widely scattered points. The speaker
had bravely tried to fit a curve to the data, and had plotted a line.
Von Neumann leaned over to a friend and whispered: "well, at least they
lie on a plane."
Related:
Von Neumann was the subject of many dotty professor stories. Von Neumann
supposedly had the habit of simply writing answers to homework assignments on
the board (the method of solution being, of course, obvious) when he was asked
how to solve problems....
The fathers of the field had been pretty confusing John von Neumann
speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies
sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker, and Alan
Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether
machines can think, a question of which we now know that it is about
as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim....
