P*rl in Latin, whither Python?

[Alex Martelli]

"Samuel A. Falvo II" <kc5tja at garnet.armored.net> wrote in message
news:slrn91k44t.j0u.kc5tja at garnet.armored.net...
> On Mon, 20 Nov 2000 23:36:54 -0500, Peter Hansen wrote:
> >Quod erat demonstrandum.  Dankon, Konrad.  :-)
>
> I just want to see if I can translate this myself, without any Esparanto
> knowledge.  Please forgive me if I mis-interpretted: "Please demonstrate.
> Thanks, Konrad."  Is that correct?  (Literal: Quote the demonstration
[e.g.,
> put up or shut up]; thanks Konrad).

The first three words are of course Latin, not Esperanto.

Literally, you could translate them "Which was [what we had] to prove".

Particularly in their acronym 'QED', they are generally used to conclude
the exposition of a theorem's proof; or, by extension, to comment on
some aspect which appears to be, if not a proof, a strong indication of
a thesis one is defending.

This was not an idiom in either Classical Latin or Mediaeval Scholarship
(although it's perfectly correct from a grammatical viewpoint).

It appears to have emerged in the very late stages of the Renaissance:
Oronce Fine [acute accent on the ending 'e' of the surname], a French
astronomer, cartographer and mathematician (also known for coining the
name 'Australia'), may have been among the first to use it (he also
used a huge variety of other sentences with the same meaning to end
his 'Propositions'), around 1550. Isaac Barrow, English mathematician
and theologian (best-known as the founder of optical geometry; arguably
the first to conceive of integration and differentiation as each other's
"inverses", the so-called "fundamental theorem of Calculus"), appears
to have been the first to systematically use the acronym 'QED' (around
1660).


Alex