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stoutfellowStill poking at the general prisms problem. Patterns are emerging; I'm beginning to make conjectures, and the faint structure of a categorization - if not yet a classification - is appearing. Still no theory.
A former student dropped by, to let me know that sometime soon he might be returning to work again on the Masters' problem I set him years ago. He mentioned another ex-student, whom (it seems) I may have done a great wrong to. I need to check one more source to be sure, but I probably owe that student a great apology. There is nothing I can do to repair the wrong, though....
I finished Cosmopolitanism, and have dived into Sublette's The World That Made New Orleans. Very interesting, so far. I was a bit puzzled, at one point, where Sublette referred to "France's greatest mathematician" and gave a name I frankly didn't recognize. But this was around 1700. Descartes, Fermat, and Pascal were dead; Lagrange, Laplace, and Legendre had not yet emerged; Newton was British, the Bernoullis Swiss, Leibniz German, and Huygens Dutch. This guy may well have been the greatest living French mathematician - but if so, it was in a fallow period. I'll have to look him up.
It's been a longish day. I should hit the sack soon.
A former student dropped by, to let me know that sometime soon he might be returning to work again on the Masters' problem I set him years ago. He mentioned another ex-student, whom (it seems) I may have done a great wrong to. I need to check one more source to be sure, but I probably owe that student a great apology. There is nothing I can do to repair the wrong, though....
I finished Cosmopolitanism, and have dived into Sublette's The World That Made New Orleans. Very interesting, so far. I was a bit puzzled, at one point, where Sublette referred to "France's greatest mathematician" and gave a name I frankly didn't recognize. But this was around 1700. Descartes, Fermat, and Pascal were dead; Lagrange, Laplace, and Legendre had not yet emerged; Newton was British, the Bernoullis Swiss, Leibniz German, and Huygens Dutch. This guy may well have been the greatest living French mathematician - but if so, it was in a fallow period. I'll have to look him up.
It's been a longish day. I should hit the sack soon.
