Bread Upon the Waters...
Mar. 27th, 2012 09:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowOne 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.)
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.)
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Date: 2012-03-28 10:14 pm (UTC)BTW, congratulations on the Chargers signing Charlie Whitehurst, who is much better than his record as Seattle's much-abused backup quarterback would have you believe. I hope he and the Chargers are very happy together, because he deserves much better than he got here.