Quest for Perfection

Read a very long but interesting article on the life story of Sergey Brin, one of Google's co-founders, on Moment Magazine's website.

Couldn't help but laugh when I got near the end of the article, which recounts a speech that Sergey delivered to a high school for gifted math students near Tel Aviv, in Israel:

"I have standard Russian-Jewish parents," he then continued in English. "My dad is a math professor. They have a certain attitude about studies. And I think I can relate that here, because I was told that your school recently got seven out of the top 10 places in a math competition throughout all Israel."

The students applauded their achievement and the recognition from Sergey, unaware that he was setting up a joke. "What I have to say," he continued, "is in the words of my father: ‘What about the other three?’"

By golly, that's just exactly what my mother would say!

In fact, she said something almost exactly like that to my sister many years ago, when she came home from school with an exam score of 98. Mom's question was -- "what happened to the other two points?" haha!