Scanning through the offered seminars today, I came across an entry that I've already mostly missed (in part because my office hourse):

Between 2:15pm and 3:15pm today, Professor Doron Zeilberger of Rutgers University offers "an elegant and insightful direct combinatorial proof of the arithmetical identity 4+5 = 2+7."

For the abstract, he wrote:

There are no trivial theorems, only trivial mathematicians (those who believe that there exist trivial theorems). Being a non-trivial mathematician myself, I will present a new, elegant, and very insightful direct combinatorial proof of the seemingly (to most people) "trivial" arithmetical theorem that states that four plus five equals two plus seven. More important, the methodology should extend to give insightful direct combinatorial proofs of even deeper identities, like (4+6+200+6+50)+(3+10+30+5)=300+4+10.

That has me intrigued. So I decided to go and look up who Doron Zeilberger is. As far as I can find out, he is famous for hypergeometric summation identities, outrageous quotes, and attention grabbing talks. For example, in 2007, he gave a talk to undergraduates at Rutgers University with the absolutely shortest possible title in any language, natural or artificial.

In addition to that, he has opinions, lots of them, lots more than I do anyhow. I admire his personality and bravado, though I don't think I agree with everything he says (especially on the use of computers in mathematics and on mathematics being an experimental science; though it pains me to admit that my most recent works are in fact inspired by explicit calculations that I performed with the aid of Mathematica).

One of the things Professor Zeilberger is well-known for, is his friend and co-author Shalosh B. Ekhad. It reminds me of F.D.C. Willard, the first cat (his name is short for Felix Domesticus Chester Willard) to publish in the physical review letters. Of course, anthropomophizing a computer is nothing new. My first website was ran by my laptop, then known as Willetta. Sortir en Pantoufles also used to keep her own blog under the name Virtrude Stein. (I will not provide a hyperlink here, since I haven't completely ported that to my current website. Let me give a sample of her writings

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If the rhythm of the above paragraphs sound familiar, this is because the grammatical structure of each entry parallels that of entries from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. What I said about this project way back when:

The piece of work was a failure for its original purpose impersonating (via an inanimate object) the genius of Gertrude Stein and thus was relegated (by a disappointed artist) to reinterpret and resurrect the Dadaist practice of cutting up a newspaper article and throwing the words in a bag and pulling them out at random to leave the act of composition up to chance, except that in the present case the bag is replaced by 53 different hats and that the process involves carefully categorizing each word of the 10 articles chosen from the internet (sharing a common thread as deemed appropriate by Google) by its grammatical function into a specific hat and drawing them out from the hats in an order deemed grammatically "correct" in the sense of Tender Buttons. And that the author is now a computer.

and so that's that.)

In any case, Doron Zeilberger sounds like a swell guy. Wish I did go to his seminar.