Another Einstein Story

Thanks to Leonard Milberg ’53 for his stories about Albert Einstein (Inbox, November issue). I’d offer another, also from that era at Princeton. When my father, Roland Frye ’43, was in graduate school at Princeton in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he would often clear his mind by taking long walks around Lake Carnegie. On one such walk, he noticed a sailor, way out in the lake, trying quite unsuccessfully to direct his sailboat. He could not control it at all. As my father continued his walk, he thought to himself, “This guy has no sense of vectors or any other mathematics associated with moving an object from one place to another.” A half-hour later, as my father returned home, he noticed the same man finally docking his sailboat. The sailor was Albert Einstein.