Abstract

[stoutfellow]

A week or two before a colloquium talk, posters go up announcing it. They include a brief description of the talk, usually a rather dry abstract.

I am strongly tempted to submit the following description for my talk:

"The first person to stumble on it refused to take it seriously.

The first person to take it seriously refused to discuss it in public.

The first person to discuss it publicly used a language few mathematicians understood.

The first person to discuss it in a well-known language got curb-stomped by the greatest mathematician of the age.

Here at SIUE, we teach it every fall.

This is the story of non-Euclidean geometry."

Comments

[stoutfellow]

Y'know, I *knew* exactly which song you were linking to, sight unseen.

(It's a vile slander; Lobachevsky was, by all accounts, a genuinely good man. Lehrer chose him purely for the rhythm - NIK-o-lai i-VAN-o-vich Loba-CHEV-sky is my NAME.)