Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Great Fathers of Twins: Paul Cohen

In my attempt to strike a balance between twin fatherhood and work, I am working from home today catching up on reading math publications.  I started out by reading a fascinating article on Paul Cohen, one of the great 20th century mathematicians.  One of his great accomplishments was showing that two of the major open questions of the time could neither be proved nor disproved from the accepted laws of mathematics.

Partway through the article, I ran across this picture:


Those boys look about the same age. They couldn't be...twins, could they? Yep. This later picture makes it clearer that they're identical:

My wife, Christina, could tell that they were identical from the first picture. I don't know whether her powers of twin motherhood also enable her to tell them apart. She also noticed Paul Cohen's wife's name in the caption.

Of all the distractions of working from home, I did not expect this one.

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