A Party to Remember

      Planning a party can be very difficult. It is especially so if you are planning a little social get-together for mathematicians. I had to take into consideration everything about my guests. What do they like to do? What kinds of food do they enjoy? Whom would I invite?

      Finally, I decided on a costume party. On the invitations (which, consequentially, were roughly in the shape of infinity), I requested that each of my guests come dressed as another person, either make believe or real. Math related costumes were optional. Then I made the goodies. I made cookies in the shapes of numbers and the traditional mathematical symbols. I threw together a punch consisting of 7-Up, Hawaiian Punch, and fresh fruit. Pretzels and chips were set out on a long table with a vegetable tray and a bowl of candy.

      Soon my guests began arriving. Herbert Ellis Robbins appeared on my doorstep in a sailor's costume complete with bell-bottoms. I just had to invite him. Robbins is a famous mathematician from my home state. He was born in Newcastle, Pennsylvania. He also has an odd thought process and a unique way with words. Probably, his most famous quote is "no good deed shall go unpunished." When I asked him why he was wearing a sailor's uniform, he replied, "I was in the Navy, after all."

      The next guest to arrive was Martin Gardner from Tulsa, Oklahoma. He responded to my solicitous question that his wife and two sons were doing "just fine." Then I got a good look at his costume. He was dressed as Humpty Dumpty, the famous egghead. I asked if there was any symbolism between that and his intellect. He looked at me blankly for a second and then shook his head with a smile. "It's just a reminder of my days as editor of Humpty Dumpty magazine. It was a toss up between this costume, Casey and Alice." He was referring to his annotated versions of Casey at the Bat and Alice in Wonderland. Gardner has a wide range of interests including the paranormal and magic. I figured that his popular ideas of math as a fun subject would interact nicely with the other guests.

      The next person to show up was Constance Reid as Bo-Peep. Although she is not technically a mathematician, she has written a number of books on the subject and has always shown an interest in learning more math. She would be a companion for me, as a non-mathematician, when the other guests moved their discussions off into the mathematical stratosphere. She answered, upon my questioning, that she just "felt like being Bo-Peep."

      Our conversation was interrupted by a knock on my door. I answered it and greeted Raymond Smullyan from Long Island. He looked like a walking chess piece. Actually, he looked like a king who had just stepped off the playing board. Obviously, he had just taken the title of one of his books, Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes quite seriously in contemplating his costume. I invited Smullyan not only for his love of mathematical logic problems and magic, but also for his musical talent. After all, I needed some sort of music at the party. He graciously agreed to play the piano.

      As Smullyan began playing Beethoven's Ninth, my doorbell rang. I opened it to find Barry Peratt from Rochester, Minnesota dressed as a large, colorful butterfly. When he saw my puzzled face, he quickly explained that he was wearing such a costume as a symbol of his area of expertise, chaos theory. It was an off shoot of the "Butterfly Effect," he continued. A butterfly flaps its wings in Peking and it rains in Central Park. His invitation was necessary, as he was my debate coach in tenth grade. Besides, his ideas on chaos would incite some interesting debates at the party.

      I was just closing the door behind Peratt when Ronald Lewis from Taft, California stepped up to the door. He was wearing a riotous Harlequin costume and carrying a bag- which, he said, contained juggling balls, a boomerang, and four Rubik's cubes. He immediately headed for the center of the party and began displaying his juggling talent. His invitation was a result of my respect for a unique mathematician. He is an expert at juggling and gymnastics, yet he is also an excellent mathematician. He won the 1975 Polya Award and worked on the Apollo moon launch for NASA.

      We were all watching Graham when the doorbell rang again. I answered the door and let Persi Diaconis enter. He was wearing a long, flowing wizard's robe and a tall pointed hat. He also brought his magic tricks. He graciously offered to take over the entertainment when Graham got weary. I told him that he would have quite a while to wait. "Don't worry," he said, "I brought some McCarthy puzzles to work on."

      I heard yet another knock on the door and opened it to find Pierre Fermat and Dr. Andrew Wiles. Fermat was wearing a giant chicken costume and Wiles was in a red fox suit. They both looked slightly unhappy to be seen together. When I questioned Fermat about his outfit, he replied that it was the only costume he could find on such short notice. He quickly joined the rest of the party, thereby escaping from Wiles's company. Wiles had challenged Fermat's Last Theorem, an + bn = cn, and had reportedly solved it. (no wonder Fermat didn't like him!) Wiles explained that his costume was symbolic of his "defeat" of Fermat. "I found out that he was coming as a chicken, so I got a fox outfit," he said. "The fox always raids the henhouse." I shrugged and sent him into the living room where the party was. I had begun to think that I had made a mistake in inviting the two of them.

      After an hour, I was still missing a guest. Then a knock on my door signaled the fact that my wayward guest had just arrived. I opened the door to Paul Erdos, the famous and eccentric mathematician from Hungary. "My mind is open," he said as he walked past me. "Uh-oh," I thought. He wasn't wearing any costume. I asked him about it and he replied with a shrug, "I guess I either lost the invitation or never got it." Erdos is a genius, but he is also rather absent minded. He's authored over a thousand papers and spends incredible amounts of time working through math problems. He is really one of a kind.

      The party went well. My guests had a wonderful time. Gardner, Graham, and Diaconis all performed for us. A small scuffle broke out when Graham brought out a pair of scissors and attempted to take them to Erdos's messy hair. Another minor problem surfaced when Fermat and Wiles engaged in an argument about Fermat's Last Theorem. Someone else swiped Erdos's amphetamines. He threw a fit. Yet, in all, the party was a success. My only problem now is how to get rid of Paul Erdos. He comes an hour late and stays days after the party is done. How in the world am I supposed to tell one of the world's greatest mathematicians to scram?

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