[Edu-sig] Rapunsel, Rapunsel

[kirby urner]

On 4/5/06, Peter Chase <pchase at sulross.edu> wrote:
>
> How about Euclid?  Has he influenced either one of you?
>

Euclid has influenced Arthur a lot (that's all I'll say on that score,
leaving the details to him).

I've approached Euclid in various ways, including via mathematician
Ralph Abraham, an ISEPP lecturer and 1997 Oregon Math Summit keynoter
and workshop leader.[1]

If you want some more background, I trace three prongs of a fork for
the "4D" meme, which got started around turn of the 19th century. 
Extended Euclideanism is one of the three:
http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2004/11/matrix.html

Also, Euclid was into more than just geometry.  The so-called
Euclidean Algorithm (EA), later enhanced to become the Extended
Euclidean Algorithm (EEA), is all over the place in computer science
literature (including in Knuth, Vol 3, including in Python).

Whether Euclid deserves all the credit for this algorithm is maybe up
for dispute, but that wouldn't be my interest.  The fact is, he knew
about it and used it.

Kirby

[1]  http://www.grunch.net/synergetics/mathsummit.html