Whatever happened to the celebrity scientist? Was there ever such a thing, or do I just get the mistaken impression from reading histories of the 20th century that men like Bohr, Oppenheimer, and Feynman were household names?
"At Jason, taking problems to Dyson is something of a parlor trick. A group of scientists will be sitting around the cafeteria, and one will idly wonder if there is an integer where, if you take its last digit and move it to the front, turning, say, 112 to 211, it’s possible to exactly double the value. Dyson will immediately say, 'Oh, that’s not difficult,' allow two short beats to pass and then add, 'but of course the smallest such number is 18 digits long.' When this happened one day at lunch, William Press remembers, 'the table fell silent; nobody had the slightest idea how Freeman could have known such a fact or, even more terrifying, could have derived it in his head in about two seconds.' "
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=dyson&st=cse&scp=2
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