David McElroy

I hadn’t thought about heffalumps for many, many years. But as Lucy and I walked tonight, I told her we were patrolling the neighborhood for heffalumps. I laughed as I explained to my dog about why the inhabitants of the Hundred-Acre Wood are so scared of these fierce imaginary creatures.

If anybody had heard my conversation with Lucy, he might have thought I’d gone mad. But I was just having joyful fun — and Lucy didn’t seem to mind.

I had meant to watch Disney’s “Christopher Robin” when it came out last summer, but I didn’t get around to it until Tuesday night. For me, the movie doesn’t get magical until Madeline — Christopher’s daughter — unexpectedly meets Pooh,  Piglet, Eeyore and Tigger while they’re on the way to London to save Christopher’s job. Every moment from there on is wonderful. But nothing tops the last few minutes — when Christopher, his wife Evelyn, and Madeline join all the animals for an afternoon in the Hundred-Acre Wood.

It was at that point when I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to be part of this loving fantasy of family and whimsy. And it brought tears to my eyes.

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In 1939, George Dantzig was late for a graduate-level statistics class at the University of California, Berkeley. The young doctoral student noted two problems on the blackboard, so he copied them, assuming they were homework. The problems seemed more difficult than usual, so it took him a few days to work out solutions and turn them in.

He apologized to his professor for being late turning in the homework, but the professor just told him to put it on his overcrowded desk. Nothing else was said about the work until about six weeks later. On a Sunday morning, Dantzig and his wife were awakened at 8 a.m. The professor was banging on the door, all excited.

“[The professor] rushed in with papers in hand, all excited,” Dantzig told the College Mathematics Journal in a 1986 interview. “‘I’ve just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it out right away for publication.’ For a minute I had no idea what he was talking about. To make a long story short, the problems on the blackboard that I had solved thinking they were homework were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics. That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them.”

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