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Comment by inigyou

16 hours ago

apocryphally a typesetter saw "make x as small as possible" at the end of a math problem to be typeset, and did exactly that

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inigyou

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gjm11  4 hours ago

The version of this story I heard is in Littlewood's "A Mathematician's Miscellany"[1] and it's a sigma rather than an x. But he tells it as something that happened specifically to him -- he wrote a memo that ended with "thus sigma should be made as small as possible", and that bit was absent but there was in its place a very very tiny sigma. Unless he's outright lying, I think this one actually happened!

[1] The more recent edition is titled "Littlewood's Miscellany"; I am fairly sure this story is in both the older and the newer version.