Can Mathematicians Add up? Part 2

Earlier this year, I discussed whether there was any real evidence to support the urban myth, that professional Mathematicians, as a group of individuals, are hopeless at basic mental arithmetic.

I have been searching books, and the internet, to see if there is any hard evidence that could prove this myth, as fact; or alternatively, to discover exactly when and why the myth began.

I have since been reading a book by Karl Sabbagh, called Dr Riemann's Zero's.  The book, details the search for a proof, related to prime numbers.

In that book, I discovered a few passages, that help towards perhaps proving that some very well known mathematicians couldn't add up!  The extracts below are lifted from chapter 7 (The Bieberbach Conjecture):



'The popular idea of mathematics, is that it is largely concerned with calculations.  What many people don't realize - and mathematicians at parties have given up correcting them - is that mathematicians are often no better calculators, and sometimes worse, than the average non-mathematician'.


'Louis De Branges [...] discussing the idea that mathematicians did all their best work when they were young, and I asked him when he made some particular insight.  'Let's see', he said, 'It happened in 1984 and I was born in 1932.  So was I fifty?  How old was I then...?'


'Ernst Kummer, another professional mathematician [...] was also bad at elementary arithmetic: 'one story has him standing before a blackboard, trying to compute 7 times 9. "Ah," Kummer said to his high school class, "7 times  9 is eh, uh, is uh..."  "61," one of his students volunteered.  "Good," said Kummer, and wrote 61 on the board.  "No," said another student, "it's 69."  "Come gentlemen," said Kummer, "it can't be both.  It must be one or the other."



And finally, a lovely description of Mathematics by an unknown American Mathematician in the 19th Century:


"Mathematics is no more the art of reckoning and computation than architecture is the art of making bricks or hewing wood, no more than painting is the art of mixing colours on a palette, no more than the science of geology is the art of breaking rocks, or the science of anatomy the art of butchering".