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Happy Birthday Louis Nirenberg! Born: February 28, 1925
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“Nirenberg was a year behind me at McGill but we took some math classes together. One was complex variables. Louie and everyone else were math physics majors. He was first in the final exam and I was second, but the gap between us was larger than the difference in height between Base Camp and Camp IV on Everest, or better still between the bottom of the sea and Camp IV. He brought in his own proofs and debated them with the professor!”
from a famously modest Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 1992
Rudolph A. Marcus, April 2, 2015
From Nirenberg himself . . . .
"I love inequalities. So if somebody shows me a new inequality, I say: 'Oh, thats beautiful, let me think about it,' and I may have some ideas connected to it."
"I wrote one paper . . . that was elementary but enormous fun to do. That's the thing I try to get across to people who don't know anything about mathematics, what fun it is! One of the wonders of mathematics is you go somewhere in the world and you meet other mathematicians, and it's like one big family. This large family is a wonderful joy."