The x factor

Rupert Crawshay-Williams 1908 -1977 was one of the clever people at Bletchley who helped solve the German Enigma code, a friend of Bertrand Russell, and Turing, and a founding member of the Classification Society (Now the British CS) . He wrote a fascinating and little read book, "The Methods and Criteria of Reasoning" in which he attempted to understand why people argue. Which briefly, he concluded was a lack of congruence on basic assumptions by the participants, which whilst it might fall into that calss entitled "Statements of the Bleedin' Obvious" is rarely obvious to the argueifiers arguists people involved in the argument. The book also includes the first discussion of Turings so called "dilemma", whereby he set the task of a von Neumann machine to be interrogated and for the operator to decide if they were interacting with machine or a man or a woman.

He would therefore have enjoyed the following which has been sent to Lord Patel as an example (perhaps apocryphall) of the more inventive approach to the solution of algebraic problems that examiners have tasked their (in this case), evidently reluctant audience.

There is a simplicity and brevity which has to be admired, tempered with a deep foreboding that the sender's female offspring is destined to the the author of similiar assaults on the intellect of examiners - redeemed to some extent by her skill at understanding non-Euclidian problems associated with dribbling a football (soccer ball. -US.var.) and bending it like Beckham, combined with an unerring and deadly accuracy with an imperfectly shaped snowball.