When I was a middle-school student, I decided to become a physicist after reading a book "Relativity" written by Albert Einstein.
When I was a child, I was impressed by the following simple arguement to explain why a heavy stone should not fall faster than a light one.
Suppose the heavy stone falls faster than the light one. If they are tied together,
Claim i) the composite object should fall slower than the heavy stone because the light one would pull the heavy one upward.
Claim ii) the composite object should fall faster than the heavy stone because the composite object is heavier than the heavy stone.
Claim i) and ii) cannot hold together because it is contradiction.
Thus, a heavy stone should not fall faster than a light stone.
When I was a high-school student, I wondered whether God does exist. I could not prove that God exists, but I conceived the following proof for the existence of something eternal.
Suppose that there is nothing eternal.
Then, the truth value of the sentence "there is nothing eternal" should not be eternal. So, if the sentence is true, it should become false at some point in the future, and vice versa. This is contradiction.
Thus, by reduction to absurdity, there must be something eternal.
Since eternity is the principal property of God, I tend to think that God exists at least in some form although I do not explicitly believe in a religion.
Recently, I was wondering why human's logic systems (or human's brains) end up with a contradiction when assuming there is nothing eternal. One plausible answer is that a human in itself could be an eternal being. Suppose a man is an eternal being. Then it is very natural for him to have a contradiction if he assumes there is nothing eternal (simply because he himself is eternal). Thus, I made a tentative conclusion that a human is an eternal being, so death is not the end.
When I was young, I was impressed by an anecdote about Ramanujan and an integer 1729.
One day, Ramanujan was sick and Hardy went to see him by taxi.
Hardy told him that the plate number of the taxi was 1729 which seems to be uninteresting.
Ramanujan said it is not true because 1729 is the smallest natural number which can be expressed as a sum of two cubic numbers in more than one way.
Actually, 1729 = 10^3 + 9^3 = 12^3 + 1^3.
This is why I chose to attach 1729 in my gmail address.
The following is a list of people whom I like and brief reasons why I like them. The order is random and the list is not complete yet.
Archimedes (BC 287 ~ BC 212) : He conceived the concept of integration more than 2000 years ago!!!??!?!?!
Galileo Galilei (1564 ~ 1642) : He is the first physicist who I read a book (biography) about.
Albert Einstein (1879 ~ 1955) : "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."
Richard Feymann (1918 ~ 1988) : He tends to think in his own way, instead of relying on authority or becoming obsessed with stereotypes or just
following the way other people think.
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 ~ 1855) : He showed only the final results without revealing dirty calculations he did and many of them were not
published, so other people had to re-prove or re-discover what he already proved...
Bernhard Riemann (1826 ~ 1866) : He gave a lecture where he wrote only a single equation on the blackboard, and Gauss was so impressed by the
lecture.
Evariste Galois (1811 ~ 1832) : Algebra was one of my favorite undergraduate courses and I was impressed by the beauty of Galois theory.
Pierre de Fermat (1607 ~ 1665) : I can give many good reasons why I like him, but the margin is too small to include the reasons.
Grigori Perelman (1966 ~ ) : He is a mathematician with a pure soul.