“It is a lucky thing that newspaper reporters do not attend these meetings. If they did, they would see how little our activities are related to the real needs of society.”

—  Leonard Eugene Dickson

L. E. Dickson, during a discussion period that followed the presentation of a paper at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society, where he criticized the choice of the paper’s topic. Fifteen minutes later he presented a paper of his own outlining a proof that every sufficiently large integer can be written as a sum of, not 1140 tenth powers (the best previous result), but 1046 tenth powers.
Source: Howard Eves in Return to Mathematical Circles http://primes.utm.edu/glossary/page.php?sort=Strobogrammatic

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Leonard Eugene Dickson 1
American mathematician 1874–1954

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