Larry Fleinhardt quotes from Numb3rs

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

Here's a discussion: Why is it we remember the past and not the future?

Charlie Eppes

That's a tough one, Larry.

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

You know that it's considered unsolvable?

Charlie Eppes

Well, certainly people who have failed to solve it think that.

Charlie Eppes

Larry, have a minute?

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

Yes. Because we all have exactly the same number of minutes at all times, do we not?

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

Let me ask one thing. When we met just now, was I coming or going in to the library?

Charlie Eppes

Larry, you were coming out.

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

[sighs] My memory is a memory. All right. [starts back inside]

Charlie Eppes

[yells] Larry, you were coming out.

Charlie Eppes

I once had a girl in my combinatorics seminar tell me that I was disorganized and I talked too fast.

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

That's an accurate observation, actually.

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

I'm avoiding Laurel Wilson.

Amita Ramanujan

The professor of philosophy of science?

Charlie Eppes

She's the lady you go hiking with?

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

For years we've enjoyed this ... I don't know ... delightful wilderness-based friendship, entirely platonic. But last night, she and I just veered ... we veered off into the carnal.

Amita Ramanujan

I'm taking it didn't go well.

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

Actually, it was incredible. It was primal. I mean, in the animal, not the numerical, sense. But what I'm saying, this was a perfect event, and, as such, untwinnable.

Amita Ramanujan

So, because the sex was great, the odds are against it ever being great again.

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

The replication defies the laws of probability.

Amita Ramanujan

[dryly] So, why try?

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

[missing the sarcasm] Yes, yes. That's why I'm here. I mean, it's the perfect refuge.

Charlie Eppes

What do you mean, "the perfect refuge"?

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

Well, the math department must be the least libidinous place on campus.

Charlie Eppes

It's like the evidence proves him right and wrong at the same time.

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

Oh yeah, the old paradox of Schrödinger's cat.

Alan Eppes

Is that that Persian that keeps hiding out in our garage?

Charlie Eppes

Uh-uh, it's an intellectual exercise.

Alan Eppes

I knew that.

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

Children are wormholes. They're portals into the unreachable future and unattainable past. Well as .the things stand now, they exist only in theoretical realms.

Amita Ramanujan

Well.. I consider, you might have some trouble selling a woman the idea of carrying your wormhole.

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

Evaluating my immediate prospects for a conventional nuclear family, I've just now begun to consider adoption.

Charlie Eppes

How long have you been considering that?

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

Three days.

Charlie Eppes

Give it a few more days.

Charlie Eppes

In the first place, uh, we-we're not even sure that there, that there is a bomb, so ...

Alan Eppes

Bomb?

Charlie Eppes

Well, we don't know where it's gonna go off.

Alan Eppes

Well, maybe not, but I would suggest that people quickly taking a ride out of town in an easterly direction might be of help right now.

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

Well, possibly not with these current wind conditions.

Don Eppes

Look, what you hear stays in this room.

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Don Eppes

A truck carrying three casks of this stuff was hijacked this morning.

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

Oh, that's not optimal.

Charlie Eppes

Coincidences are a mathematical reality. Statistically unlikely events can and often do occur. Just look at the genesis of our planet.

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

Well, now, I agree that the factors that brought about life on Earth were statistically unlikely, but given the vastness of the cosmos, the limitless possibilities for matter and energy ... I'm with Einstein on this. There are no accidents.

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

You know, that term "dark matter" has always perplexed me. It fallaciously implies that the 95% of our universe that cannot be observed is some amorphous, eventless emptiness.

Amita Ramanujan

I'm sorry?

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

I guess it's all too human. Instead of admitting to the present limits of our knowledge, we just declare things to be unknowable.

Charlie Eppes

You know, this isn't the first love letter I've ever received. When I published my first article in the American Journal of Mathematics, I was invited to spend the weekend at a bed and breakfast in Santa Barbara.

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

Did you go?

Charlie Eppes

Ah, I was fourteen. My mother had to break the news to a very embarassed female professor at Berkeley.

Charlie Eppes

Larry, I was there when he gave that paper. And you stood up and called him a big fat cheater in front of a room full of people.

Dr. Larry Fleinhardt

Well, no. Now, you're exaggerating. That room could not have been more than half full.