Carl Friedrich Gauss, 1777-1855

I was listening to This American Life this weekend, a great radio show (link to their archives at the right). Patrick found an episode with the timely theme of fathers. One of the stories was told by a guy whose father abandoned his family--to look for aliens.

I won't go into that story, but there was a side story that really made me laugh. It regards Carl F. Gauss, the person widely regarded as the greatest mathematician of all time. I don't know enough math to have an opinion about this, though I've read some impressive stories about Gauss' childhood accounting feats.

Anyway, Gauss apparently thought that intelligent life had probably evolved in other parts of the universe, and he thought it would be neat to get in touch with them. But since he lived about 200 years ago, he didn't have access to satellites, space ships, even radio signals. So he came up with some other ideas:

1) Get the Russian army to chop a demonstration of the Pythagorean Theorem (a squared plus b squared equals c squared, used to find the lengths of the sides of a right triangle) into the Siberian forest, large enough to be seen from space and clear evidence that we Earthlings are civilized, and

2) Dig a huge trench in the shape of a perfect circle in the Sahara desert, fill it with kerosene, and, in the dark of night, light it on fire.

Brilliant, ladies and gentlemen. Simply brilliant.

It reminds me of a quote I read somewhere: "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."