Monday, October 31, 2005

Stephen McIntyre: a math prodigy

Update: I've added the answer to the title.

Try to solve my conundrum and identify the following person - who is far too modest to reveal the following data although it may be relevant for many people to form their opinion:
  • much like Albert Einstein, he is often considered to be an outsider in the field in which he is moderately famous today
  • he stood first among his countrymates in an international math contest at the high school
  • he comes from the second territorially largest country in the world
  • he studied pure math at the University of T., and typically stood 2nd
  • the country may be the same country where the first commenter under this article lives, and the T. city is the city where "casting is coming" according to her blog
  • he was offered a full scholarship for PhD in mathematical economics at MIT when such offers were rare
  • Paul Samuelson (Nobel prize in 1970) made this offer by phone
  • it won't help you but a nephew of the P.S. above is the president of a certain well-known university in Massachusetts
  • among the mathematical adjectives, our mystery man always liked "elegant" and "nontrivial"
  • however, he chose a job of a director of various "search companies" unrelated to the Internet
  • he is often viewed as an opponent of a person who is not a clear thinker and who uses inflated terminology to describe trivial operations
  • this opponent is thus very inelegant, but the opponent's work has really been rejected because it was methodologically flawed
  • the last name of the opponent means a person of politically incorrect sex in a major European language
  • the second largest country mentioned above also recently happens to be the second most successful country in a certain sport, after the Czech Republic
  • a certain tool is necessary for this game
  • our mysterious person has become very famous for playing with this tool, although normally he prefers to spend his leisure time with squash
  • The Reference Frame estimates that his mathematical IQ exceeds that of those who essentially paint him as an amateurish outsider roughly by 15 in average, and a similar comparison holds for his effectivity, accuracy, and breadth of his analyses
  • he has a blog whose quality, extent, and usefulness is higher by one order of magnitude than a blog of his opponents, although the number of these opponents is higher by an order of magnitude than the number of mysterious men you are trying to identify
  • in 2007, he will be able to reverse-engineer NASA's data and find a bug that will be corrected and 1934 will become the warmest U.S. year on record instead of 1998
If you want to know who he is, try to click at the comments, assuming that someone else has already solved the conundrum before you. :-)