Why did I start nicknaming him Maestro? Because it was pretty much literal: he played math like a master would with a mu

It is a not well-known fact that mathematics can also be learned by playing –just watch the private correspondence, discussions and pranks of the members of the august Bourbaki circle. Some of us (and it includes this author) do not perform well on tasks via “cold” approaches, unable to muster the motivation to do boring things. But, somehow we upregulate when stimulated or when there is play (or money) involved. This may disturb many people married to cookie-cutter pedagogical methods that require things to be drab, boring, and bureaucratic for them to be effective –but that’s reality.,I still take chances with failure. I even dare to try and to dream. I do this knowing that the only way to succeed or fail is to try to do something. I can’t afford to be neutral to both success and failure.,Would I have found success in the professional ranks, like ’96 Atlanta medalists Wladimir Klitschko and Floyd Mayweather? Or would I have joined the long list of Olympians who never made any headlines after their Olympic triumphs?,Over parts of five Major League seasons between the Indians (2016–2020) and Padres, Clevinger has a 44–23 career record with a 3.19 ERA (192 ER, 542.1 IP), 1.19 WHIP and 603 strikeouts in 105 games (92 starts). He finished the 2020 campaign with the 5th-highest career winning percentage (.657) among all active ML starters (min. 50 GS), trailing only Walker Buehler (.727), Shane Bieber (.708), Max Fried (.703) and Clayton Kershaw (.697), and among all ML pitchers who have tossed at least 300.0 IP since the start of 2018, Clevinger’s 154 ERA ranks 6th behind Jacob deGrom (187), Hyun-Jin Ryu (179), Justin Verlander (172), Gerrit Cole (162) and Max Scherzer (155). The Jacksonville, Fl. native was originally selected by the Los Angeles Angels in the 4th round of the 2011 MLB First-Year Player Draft from Seminole Community College (Sanford, Fla.).,He was neither interested in money nor rank –something refreshing as I was only exposed to academics who whether they admit it or not, are obsessed with both. When I asked him about commercializing his website cut-the-knot his answer was “I have two pensions. Next year I turn seventy”. He wasn’t interested in poisoning his life for more money.,I cannot say if my life would have been better as a boxer or not. Perhaps I would have gone on to win a world title. Maybe I would have ended up undecorated after strings of defeats.,I met him in an Italian restaurant in New Jersey. I was surprised to see a mathematician who looked much more like a maturing actor than someone in a technical specialty: tall, athletic, jovial, and with a charismatic presence. But, as he had warned me, he had a severe hearing problem, the result of a medical treatment for the flu.,I, for myself, started almost every day with a puzzle, with the excitement of unpredictability, as it took from 5 minutes to 4 hours to complete –and it was usually impossible to tell from the outset. For a couple of years, it was the first thing I looked at with the morning coffee. There was some mild competition, mild enough to be entertaining but not too intense to resemble an academic rat race. Once someone got a proof, we had to look for another approach so it paid to wake up early and beat those with a time zone advantage.,How do you learn a language? There are two routes; the first is to memorize imperfect verbs, grammatical rules, future vs. past tenses, recite boring context-free sentences, and pass an exam. The second approach consists in going to a bar, struggling a little bit and, out of the need to blend-in and integrate with a fun group of people, then suddenly find yourself able to communicate. In other words, by playing, by being alive as a human being. I personally have never seen anyone learn to speak a language properly by the first route. Also, I have never seen anyone fail to do so by the second one.,It is thanks to Maestro Alexander B. that numerous people have learned mathematics by the second route, by playing, just for the sake of entertainment. He helped many to make it their hobby. His mathematical website cut-the-knot has trained a generation –many seemingly approached the problem as hobbyists then got stuck with it. For, if you liked mathematics just a little bit, Maestro Bogomolny made it impossible for you to not love it. Mathematics was turned into a frolic.,In my relentless pursuit of boxing glory, I ignored important relationships. When failure hit, I had an opportunity to revisit and refresh critical personal connections. I wrote letters to family members and old friends and spent time with those nearby. Some of those connections formed the building blocks for the next phase of my life.,Social media brings out the best and the worst in people. He was rigorous yet open-minded, allowing people like me (who did some mathematical economics and finance) to cheat with inequalities by using the various canned methods for finding minima and maxima. He even tolerated computerized mathematics, provided of course there was some rigor in the process. I initially knew nothing about him but could observe rare attributes: an extraordinary amount of patience and a remarkable sense of humor. One summer, as he was in Israel, I informed him that I was vacationing in Lebanon. His answer: “Walking distance”. He always had a short comment that makes you smile, not laugh, which is a social art.,In the two years since he left us there has been no Saturday morning –104 of them –that I did not solve a riddle randomly selected on the web in his memory. But, without him, it is not the same.,This explained to me his veering away from an academic career to get involved in computer pedagogy. His hearing was worsening with time. It is hard to imagine being a professor with reduced auditory function in one ear (in spite of a hearing aid) and none in the other.,I still take chances with failure. I even dare to try and to dream. I do this knowing that the only way to succeed or fail is to try to do something. I can’t afford to be neutral to both success and failure.