Celebrated, cerebrated

At a seminar today, the Chinese speaker made a reference to “a cerebrated result” of this-and-that. That was a typo, of course, but after thinking a bit it seems a lot more appropriate than the intended wording.

You need a lot of cerebrating — thinking, brain-wracking, puzzling out, whacking the ol’ intracranial meatball against the walls — to get mathematics. (Well, you need to be on the thin end of the probability curve, too — so-called “luck” — but for the most part it’s just thinking. And a lot of cursing.)

Mathematicians celebrating something — well, we can get drunk as well as anyone. That’s about it. And I’d rather not lump a beautiful theorem into the same class as either the 41th anniversary of the Massacre of Borington Heights, or a bronze in European Wheelchair-Stair Bowling Championships.

What’s better: that something has been the result of and caused a lot of thinking, or that it has made people vomit into toilets with lampshades on their heads?

Or am I revealing too much of my dull mathematical self just by asking that?