[Alan Guth (with help from Jenny Guth):] One of my favorite stories about Murray Gell-Mann comes from my daughter, Jenny Guth, who in the summer of 2006 was a student of theoretical neuroscience, attending a summer program for undergraduates at the Santa Fe Institute. Murray had apparently seen Jenny's name on a list of visiting students and identified her as my daughter. He approached her one day and began a conversation with the surprising comment "I know your grandfather." It turned out that Murray had always assumed, I suppose because Guth is not too common a name, that I was the son of Eugene Guth, a theoretical physicist who made important contributions to polymer, nuclear, and solid state physics from the 1930's through the 1960's. But it isn't true.
Jenny was somewhat startled and was trying to figure out what Murray was talking about. Her actual grandfather, Hyman Guth, was not a physicist; he was the owner of a small dry cleaners in New Brunswick, New Jersey. "How do you know my grandfather?," she tried to ask. "I've known Eugene Guth for many years," Murray replied, giving the name an authentic Hungarian pronunciation that made it difficult for Americans to recognize. "But that's not my grandfather," Jenny tried to interject, but Murray had gone into a monologue that could not be slowed down. He had apparently expected her not to recognize the name, due to the correctness of his pronunciation. He continued with a lecture about how Jenny should learn how her grandfather's name was properly pronounced, and how she should be proud of her Hungarian roots and learn more about them. Try as she did, Jenny could not get in a word.
It is not completely clear how this conversation ended, but apparently Jenny was eventually able to cause Murray to realize that there might be a flaw in his theory about the Guth family connections. But Murray was not the kind of person to dwell on his mistakes or even discuss them, so he quietly walked away and did not bring up the subject again.
Source: https://www.edge.org/conversation/murray_gell_mann-remembering-murray (accessed Dec. 4, 2024).