What is this anecdote?

May 28, 2022 12:34 PM

Trying to find an anecdote about a (possibly well-known) man who is sent upstairs by his wife to change his clothes before a dinner party. When he doesn't come back down, she goes searching for him and finds him asleep in bed. The joke being that he took off his clothes like he usually does before going to bed and just... kept going.

That's it. That's the anecdote. Not sure where I heard it.

posted by logicpunk to Grab Bag (3 answers total)

Best answer: This was mathematician David Hilbert.

I believe I read about it in Newman's four volume World of Mathematics collection, but that does very little to narrow the primary source down, unfortunately.
posted by jamjam at 12:57 PM on May 28, 2022

This page says it came from Max Born's The Luxury of Conscience.
posted by jamjam at 1:07 PM on May 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

It's also told in Raymond Smullyan's "What is the Name of this Book?", also attributed to Hilbert, but also suggesting an older attribution to Ampere:

227. I heard the following story about the mathematician David Hilbert. I once told this story to a physicist who told me that he had heard that same story about Ampere! As I heard the story, Professor and Mrs. Hilbert were giving a party. After one guest arrived, Mrs. Hilbert took David aside and said, "David, go up and change your tie." Hilbert went up; an hour passed and he didn't come down. Mrs. Hilbert was worried, went up to the bedroom, and found Hilbert in bed asleep. When awakened, he recalled that when he took off his tie, he automatically went through the motions of taking off the rest of his clothes, putting on his pajamas, and getting into bed.

posted by cacophony at 2:49 PM on May 28, 2022 [2 favorites]