Friday, November 15, 2019

Who Knew!?


What do all these individuals have in common?:

Harry Blackmun  (former Supreme Court Judge)
Art Garfunkel
Ira Glasser  (of ACLU)
Larry Gonick  (author/cartoonist)
Teri Hatcher  (actress)
David Robinson  (NBA star)
Frank Ryan  (NFL quarterback for Cleveland Browns I well remember)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Ed Thorpe  (stock trader)
Lawrence Tribe  (lawyer)
Virginia Wade  (tennis star)

They all deeply studied or majored in math in college, but mostly not going on for the PhD. (though Frank Ryan did), nor pursue the subject much career-wise. 

I stumbled upon this somewhat fun page of “Famous Nonmathematicians” awhile back -- the above is just a small sampling from it… a couple of these folks I knew about, but most on the list were new to me.
Mathematics… it takes all kinds! (check out the whole list)


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ed Thorp has a PhD, accorindg to wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_O._Thorp.


Thorp received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1958, and worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1959 to 1961. He was a professor of mathematics from 1961 to 1965 at New Mexico State University, and then joined the University of California, Irvine where he was a professor of mathematics from 1965 to 1977 and a professor of mathematics and finance from 1977 to 1982.[3]

"Shecky Riemann" said...

yeah, thanks for adding (that's why I employed the word "mostly," but only mentioned Ryan since he was the one that surprised me)