nadal, federer, and the ghost of john von neumann

​NADAL Vs. FEDERER
(French Open Semi-Final)
Cant resist telling the John von Neumann story again. For those not familiar with that name, the laptop or smartphone you’re reading this post on is technically a von Neumann machine. But allow me to put von Neumann in truer perspective by giving you a fairer example of his acumen.
The year was 1930 and von Neumann, a young man of 27, was sitting among the audience at the famous Konigsberg conference. This is where Kurt Godel was to unveil the first draft of his first Incompleteness theorem – that specimen of outright brilliance which would forever revolutionize vast terrains in logic, physics, and mathematics. Whereas many scholars of that time failed to even gather the theorem’s full relevance, von Neumann not only comprehended it at first go, he also came up with a corollary to it. Within days, he wrote to Godel about what he’d deduced but it turned out that Godel too had arrived at the same corollary and had sent it for publication. This corollary was nothing but the second Incompleteness theorem! बोले तो, ऐवइ बैठे बैठे, you come up with an addendum to what’s arguably the most beautiful theorem of the modern era.
Anyway, coming back to the issue at hand. A friend of von Neumann once posed the following puzzle to him.
Two trains 300 miles apart are travelling toward each other along the same track. The first train goes 60 miles per hour; the second train rushes along at 90 miles per hour. A fly is hovering just above the nose of the first train. It buzzes from the first train to the second train, turns around immediately, flies back to the first train, and turns around again. It goes on flying back and forth between the two trains until they collide. If the fly's speed is 120 miles per hour, what’s the total distance it will travel?
Within just an instant of the friend’s finishing his narration, von Neumann blurted out ‘240 miles’.
‘Aha! So you used the easy method,’ said the friend.
A few seconds elapsed before Neumann realised his mistake. He blushed as he made the confession ‘Oh yes, there’s an easy method.’
(There are two ways to go about the problem. You figure out the time the trains take to collide and using that, you at once know the distance the fly travels. The second way is to sum-up the infinite series of distances which the fly goes to-and- fro. This second method is what Neumann had used.)
So yes, there are easier and more graceful ways of going about the business of tennis. But i guess they only accentuate the splendour of Nadal, that genius of the harder way.
Today, perhaps for the first time, I saw the great Federer being outclassed.