Thursday, December 07, 2017

An Imposter Physics Professor with a "Compulsion to Teach"

The case of former physics professor Marvin Hewitt is a weird one.

Quoting the Wikipedia entry: Marvin Hewitt (born 1922) was an American impostor who became, among other things, a university physics professor.

Hewitt was a high school drop-out with no qualifications who wanted to become an academic.[1] He always used names and identities of real-life people in his impostures. He later claimed that he had a "compulsion to teach".


This reminds me of the fictitious movie critic David Manning. (And, of course, there is the story of Sidd Finch.)

(Tips of the cap to MathFeed and Boing Boing.)

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