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NNadir

(37,916 posts)
2. In the old days, one could see him fairly often in and around Princeton, particularly on the "dinky."
Wed Mar 18, 2026, 06:03 PM
11 hrs ago

The "Dinky" is a one stop train that runs from Princeton and the Northeast Corridor line on NJ Transit.

No, he did not look like Russel Crowe. One of the first times I saw him to know who he was he was waiting on line at a Japanese food stand, "Teriyaki Boy" in a local upscale mall around here, the Market Fair. Nobody bothered him, he was just another guy on line. I thought he had a kind of spacey look about him, but perhaps I was primed to see him that way.

That is the cool thing about the Princeton area. One could stand in line for a falafel behind Toni Morrison, this actually happened to me, or see Andrew Wiles walking on the walkway at the edge of the golf course at the Institute for Advanced Study.

I personally had a conversation with Freeman Dyson in his office at IAS. It was, I think, the high point of my intellectual life. He was a very old man at the time, but in full command of his mind, quite unbelievable with the breadth of his thinking. He was very happy that I knew about what he called "his last scientific contribution," a study of samarium isotopes to show that the fine structure constant remained invariant over billions of years.



In the film posted in the OP Nash is walking by the Frank Gehry designed Lewis Library, to which I used to go quite often for research purposes. My son the artist and I disagree about that building, which he loves, but about which I am at best ambivalent. I pipe broke and flooded a map room with irreplaceable maps going back hundreds of years.

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