Émile Borel

Do you remember the scene where Mr. Burns tells Homer that he has a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters, and that soon they will finish writing the greatest novel of history? The idea of this scene is not original; it comes from the “Theorem of Infinite Monkeys” by Borel, in which the claim is that a monkey typing random characters during an infinite time will write any given text (the most common example is Hamlet by Shakespeare). Émile Borel, French mathematician and politician, was born in January of 1871, and for him are named the borelean algebras, Heine-Borel theorem, and the lunar crater Borel.