Chit Chat # 32 RTFROLI

Bob Chen

It has been a while since the last Chit Chat (# 31). I've no exciting events to write, except the following observations:

(1) S.S.'s movie talk beats Sisco and invitees by miles. It is rare that most of the movies after " To catch a thief" were familiar to me. I have not been to movies for years. I'll go see "Entrapment" for sure. Is Zeta-Jones, Tommy Lee Jones'daughter? There are other famous stars related to famous scientists. Olivia Newton-John is a great-grand-daughter of Issac Newton. Sir Ralph Richardson's uncle, Louis Richardson is the name-sake for Richardson Number. The number is as important in turbulence as Reynolds Number, Mach Number. I don't know any Chinese movie stars in this respect. Warner Chang class of '57) is a younger brother of Gui-Lai.

(2) It is delightful to read Arthur Ma's work. They are deep and profound. It comes to no surprise to me since he was the only one wrote in old fashioned Chinese for the 20th year book. It is not easy to write that way as compared to "Pu-Tung-Hua". Similarly, Peter Sun's article is no easy task to type by Chinese word processing. I tried
with NJStar, and know first hand how hard it is.

(3) Humphrey Hung Chu has surfaced, and talked to me, Desmond Wang, and Dennis Su. Dennis will try to get him to come to Toronto in August. He lives in Vancouver now. May be Dennis can get both Arthur Ma, and Humphrey to join us. Humphrey was a Lighter from '54 to '58, that qualifies him as a friend for sure.

(4) I don't know how Desmond Wang solved James T. Koo's puzzle by calculating the areas of two triangles to show the diagonal is slightly concave-up. I found a long write-up on this family of puzzles in one of Martin Gardner's Dover books. He showed that if one picks the sides from a Fibonacci series (i.e., 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,...) one can always get a hole in integer number of squares. In James Koo's case, they are 5 by 13. Also the middle number (8) when squared, differs to the product of the first and last number (5, and 13; or 5x13=65) by 1. Gardner claimed that he got all these from an ophthalmologist in New York City in the '40s. James, and Pat, may be you two want to check this out. One more clue (5x8)-(3x13)=1. The 1 can be generalized to 2,3,4,... by simply multiplying all the terms in the Fibonacci series by 2^1/2, 3^1/2,...;or, starting any other Fibonacci series other than 1,2,3,5,8,13,...rembmbering the only rule to form a Fibonacci series is: the third number is the sum of the two numbers before, with no restrictions on the two starting numbers!