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[James Harbeck]

>Remember that old cartoon - from The NY-er, I believe - featuring two
>profs? It went something like this:
>
>Prof. A to Prof. B:
>
>"It's obvious."
>
>Nevertheless, having second thoughts, A proceeds to fill two walls of
>blackboard with abstruse mathematical calculations. After he finishes,
>he turns back to B and reiterates:
>
>"Yes. It's obvious."

Oh, Richard Feynman, in _Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman_, has an
anecdote just like that:

----
At the Princeton  graduate school, the physics department  and the math
department shared  a  common lounge, and every day at four o'clock we  would
have  tea.  It  was a  way of  relaxing  in the  afternoon, in  addition  to
imitating  an  English  college.  People  would sit  around  playing  Go, or
discussing theorems. In those days topology was the big thing.
      I still  remember  a guy  sitting on the couch, thinking very hard, and
another guy standing in  front of him,  saying, "And therefore such-and-such
is true."
      "Why is that?" the guy on the couch asks.
      "It's trivial! It's  trivial!"  the standing guy says, and  he  rapidly
reels  off a series of logical steps: "First you assume thus-and-so, then we
have Kerchoff's this-and-that; then there's Waffenstoffer's Theorem,  and we
substitute this and construct that. Now you put the vector which goes around
here and  then thus-and-so..."  The  guy  on  the  couch  is  struggling  to
understand  all  this stuff, which goes on at high speed for  about  fifteen
minutes!
      Finally the  standing  guy comes out the other end, and the guy  on the
couch says, "Yeah, yeah. It's trivial."
----

James Harbeck.

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