For some strange reason I have thought and told my SE class that next week is the last week of the term. This must have confused them a lot, and I realize now that I got it all wrong. There are two more weeks to go before the break. It is odd to have made such a mistake and I’ll correct it when I see them again, but I’m happy about suddenly discovering that I suddenly have one more week to teach. There is a lot to teach in SE.

The recent excitement about P=NP has made me think about proof and mathematics, but Ingrid’s inaugral on Tuesday is perhaps an even more direct inspiration. While in Finland, I bought a four volume set called “The World of Mathematics”. I haven’t looked at it much lately, and I had thought (and implied here) that it is edited by Eric Temple Bell. He was a popularizer of Mathematics, but some have critisized his writing as a little too fictional. (I know that the right word is “fictitious”, but that makes it sound as if he was lying.) He merely romantized a little too much. Well, I discovered last night that he wasn’t the editor, although he did contribute two or three essays.  (The real editor is Newman.)

I started on the first essay by Philip Jourdain, a British logician and mathematician. His wikipedia entry is short, but he was a very interesting man. He suffered from a form of ataxia that left him a cripple at the age of about 20. Still, he went to Cambridge (didn’t do too well) and eventually became a very productive mathematician and logician and also a historian of mathematics. By the early 1900′s he was said to produce enough work to keep two typists busy full time. He died at age 40, which is impressive given his condition. (He also had a strange sister, Eleanor, who was involved in a strange episode called the “Ghosts at Petit Trianon”.  Wikipedia has all the details.)

The reason all this interests me is because a similar story can be told about so many other people. Famous (or at least well-known) in their time but nowadays forgotten. Not all of them made important contributions, but some did. Everyone knows Euclid; noone knows Ahmes. Sometimes, it is really only through an accident of history that we remember some and forget others.

Logic is invincible because in order to combat logic it is necessary to use logic.
Pierre Boutroux

Not that this is very important, but it shows that it is futile for us to “fight” history. We cannot really work to ensure our place in history. It either happens or it don’t. Perhaps we shall always remember the name of Vinay Deolalikar (whether or not P=NP), or perhaps we shall forget it quite soon. I do not think that this is a consequence of bad record keeping: human memory only has space for so many names.

This is not at all a depressing thought, though. It means that our goal should be to do the best work we can and not to worry about posterity.  Too much.