A wealthy maharajah was so delighted with the game of chess that he offered the inventor of the game anything in his realm that he might wish. The inventor said, “I wish one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two grains on the second square, four grains on the third, eight grains on the fourth, and so on, until the last square.” The maharajah exclaimed, “Why such a modest wish?! Don’t you wish my daughter’s hand, or one of my palaces, or one of the provinces I rule?” “No thank you,” the inventor said, “all I want is the amount of rice that I explained to you.” The maharajah had his treasurer calculate how much rice this would amount to. Soon he began to realize that even if the maharajah sold his entire realm with all his palaces and vast amounts of land, he would never be able to buy so much rice. This only reinforced his admiration for the inventor, and he rewarded him handsomely, but with far less than he had suggested.<\/p>\n
_____________________________<\/p>\n
Dietrich Fischer, born in 1941 in M\u00fcnsingen, Switzerland, got a Licentiate in Mathematics from the University of Bern 1968 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University 1976. 1986-88 he was a MacArthur Fellow in International Peace and Security at Princeton University. He has taught mathematics, computer science, economics and peace studies at various universities and been a consultant to the United Nations.<\/em><\/p>\n Excerpted from Dietrich Fischer’s <\/em>Stories to Inspire You<\/a> – TRANSCEND University Press-TUP<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A wealthy maharajah was so delighted with the game of chess that he offered the inventor of the game anything in his realm that he might wish.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inspirational"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59403\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}