Bread Upon the Waters...

One of the topics in my differential geometry course is the Isoperimetric Problem: if a closed curve has fixed length L, what is the maximum area it can enclose? (The answer: the area is at most L^2/(4 Pi), with equality if and only if the curve is a circle.) There's an old story about Queen Dido of Carthage and how she acquired enough land to found the city, and I always tell that story as a warmup to the discussion of the Isoperimetric Problem.

That was a month, month and a half ago. Today, as I was leaving class, one of my students told me that she'd gotten extra credit in her Latin class because she knew the story of Dido. I was grinning for the next half hour or so.

(The Latin textbook appears to be the same one - later edition, of course - that we used at UCSB back in 1975.)