Re: Marie Jean Faucounau sues me for at least 8,487 Swiss Francs

frgn_at_bluemail.ch
Date: 12/09/04 

Date: 9 Dec 2004 00:14:24 -0800

I typed a message, posted it, servor error, message lost.
Now I moved to another place and try again. Many such errors
these days. And the old Google interface worked so well ...

My adventures in the math-history list, Jul/Aug 1997, part 7

A member of the math-history list called me a good mediator,
another one thanked me for a simple algorithm of approximating
the golden rectangle: 1) Draw a small square or rectangle A.
3) Add a square to a side of square A or to a longer side of
rectangle A, thus you obtain rectangle AB. 3) Add a square to
a longer side of rectangle AB, thus you obtain rectangle ABC.
And so on. If you are a teacher of mathematics tell your pupils
to carry out such drawings on large sheets of paper, thus they
will get an immediate idea of the golden section, but if you
begin with the geometrical construction almost every child will
sigh, and hate geometry for this life and the next five lives.
Au moindre (voilà quelques mots en français pour les ami de
fr.soc.histoire.antique).

Some members of the math-history list were "howling with the
wolves" online while encouraging or consolating me via e-mail.
Students, I assume, who wished to please the professors and
were at the same time pleased to see that someone challenges
them professors and provides a little more breathing spaces
for themselves, the students ...

Nimish Shah, a young member of the math-history list, was such
a student. He told me via e-mail: "my heart goes out for you"
and that he is in much the same situation as I am online, so
he can well understand what I must feel like. The same Nimish
Shah published the post "thoughts on swiss cheese by Nimish
Shah" wherein he forwarded a message by Piers Bursil-Hill (hope
I remember the name correctly). I wrote a reply to that message,
but it was not accepted. I learned from this experience: it
doesn't matter so much if you are getting attacked, even harshly
so, really bad is when you are not allowed to reply and present
your own version of the story. Which is the reason of my fight
for the freedom of speech in the unmoderated scientific groups
on the Usenet. Everybody who is getting attacked or falsely
accused must have a possibility of giving back.

I can tell this story of Nimish Shah by now, since he stood his
final exams and is well established in his professional life.

Franz Gnaedinger, provider of breathing space, www.seshat.ch

> I got something to say, I got plenty to say, I take my time
> for writing well considered articles, being no native speaker
> of English I work double as much, I make even the most demanding
> topics understandable and accessible for interested readers,
> and I care about the layout, which is almost as important as
> a well articulated language. Google beta makes a mess of my
> messages. So please look up the original.
>
>
> My adventures in the math-history list, Jul/Aug 1997, part 6
>
> One member of the math-history list was Julio Gonzalez Cabillon.
> He knew so much about math history that someone mused whether
> he was a consortium of people writing under the same name? Julio
> wrote a message in Spanish. I took offense and gave back, making
> a joke on his behalf, illustrating the difference between the
> mathematical object a, which is identical to every other a,
> so that a = a = a ..., whereas human beings are both equal and
> different, so that an equation such as jgc1 = jgc2 = jgc3 ...
> would only partly be right, because jgc1 to jgc11 are not only
> equal, they are also different in many respects. Now Julio took
> offense and announced to leave the list. Which raised storm
> of protest. No, Julio, stay, don't leave! And of course it was
> my fault that he wished to leave. Everybody was on his side,
> nobody on mine. I had no intention at all to drive Julio away,
> and I wished to explain my joke. However, by then I was already
> banned from the list, and so I had to use a pseudonym. I chose
> "Leonardo Bigollo Pisano," better known as Leonardo Fibonacci.
> I showed up in the list as LBG and said about this:
>
> My name Bigollo has a double meaning: one who traveled
> widely, and moron. Being the son of a traveling salesman
> from Pisa, I had been born in northern Africa, have been
> raised there, and attended a Moorish school where I have
> been taught interesting algorithms of which you never
> heard. And as a man I traveled widely myself, to Egypt
> and Syria, where I gathered and reconstructed further
> old and very old algorithms, and brought them to Paris,
> where the professors only laughed at me, and in Italy
> it wasn't much better, so I adopted the name "Bigollo":
> I traveled widely, and I am treated by some as if I was
> a moron. They do not understand what I say, and therefore
> I am the moron, what is only logiccal ;-) Well then, I see
> you got a moron on board the math-history list, one FG.
> He managed to have everybody against him, and he struggles
> not only with all of you but with his English as well. He
> offended Julio, but he didn't really mean to do so, his
> joke was in fact respect spiced with irony: he simply can't
> believe that one single man could know so much in so many
> fields of math history! And he got to tell you some quite
> interesting things, much in my spirit, so please allow him
> to go on posting to your list. Not everybody who looks like
> a moron and behaves like a moron and writes like a moron is
> actually a moron, a bigollo. Yours truly, Leonardo Bigollo
> Pisano, aka Leonardo Fibonacci
>
> Julio didn't get my excuse. Later on we exchanged a couple of
> e-mails. He told me that he was really offended; he has no easy
> life at Montevideo, and then to be turned into an entire soccer
> team of Julio Gonzalez Cabillons ... I told him that I had felt
> offended by his Spanish lines, and he replied that he was just
> trying to tell me how to convey my ideas in such a forum. To
> which I replied that I did not get his advice correctly, then,
> while he misunderstood my joke, which was by far more respect
> than irony. Well, and last year, around Christmas, a student
> asked my help regarding several questions on early mathematics.
> She was enthusiastic over my website, informed Julio Gonzalez
> Cabillon, who, long ago, had founded the online forum Historia
> Matematica, and Julio sent me kind season's greetings. Now
> I think our former conflict has been settled. He is very happy
> with his new forum, and I am happy to have established my body
> of early mathematical methods on my website and in several fora
> and archives, where some of my ideas might survive and find
> another "bigollo" to carry on, hopefully.
>
> Franz Gnaedinger www.seshat.ch
>
>
> > My adventures in the math-history list, Jul/Aug 1997, part 5
> >
> > Human made things have their scientific correlates. A radio
> > has a scientific correlate in Clark Maxwell's electro-magnetic
> > field equations; a GPS device, used for example for mapping
> > the ruins and further archaeological finds on the seafloor
> > in front of Alexandria, has a scientific correlate in Albert
> > Einstein's relativity theory; and in a similar way, I dare say,
> > the Ziqqurats of Sumer and the Egyptian pyramids have their
> > scientific correlate in mathematical techniques and algorithms
> > as I am reconstructing them since 1979 (first number column),
> > 1991/92 (royal cubit and 'magic wands,' later on called Horus
> > cubits), 1993/94 (calculating the circle on the basis of the
> > Sacred Triangle 3-4-5), 1996-2002 (Rhind Mathematical Papyrus,
> > Babylonian clay tablets YBC 7829 and Plimpton 322). Must I add
> > that such work can't be published? Not necessary? Thank you.
> >
> > In my previous messages I introduced some of my number patterns.
> > Another means of early mathematics had been, I believe, number
> > sequences providing handy values of irrational numbers such
> > as pi.
> >
> > The number of the circle is less than 4, but a little more than
> > 3. Write 4 above 1, and add repeatedly 3 above 1, and look up
> > my message in the original format, for beta google makes a mess
> > of my number patterns):
> >
> > 4 (plus 3) 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28
> > 1 (plus 1) 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
> >
> > Write 3 above 1, and add repeatedly 22 above 7:
> >
> > 3 (plus 22) 25 47 69 91 113 135 157 179 201 223
> > 1 (plus 7) 8 15 22 29 36 43 50 57 64 71
> >
> > 245 267 289 311 333 355 377
> > 78 85 92 99 106 113 120
> >
> > Write 9 above 3, and add repeatedly 19 above 6:
> >
> > 9 (plus 19) 28 47 66 ... 256
> > 3 (plus 6) 9 15 21 ... 81
> >
> > A famous problem from the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus says that
> > a square of side 8 and a circle of diameter 9 have (nearly)
> > the same area. The implicit value of pi is found in the above
> > sequence: 256/81 = 3.1604... This value is often dubbed the
> > ancient Egyptian pi. However, my interpretation of over 65
> > problems from the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus led me to the
> > conviction that the Egyptians didn't use just one single value,
> > but plenty of values provided by the above and further number
> > sequences, which were also known to the Babylonians (see my
> > interpretations of YBC 7289 and Plimpton 322 on my website).
> >
> > Number columns and sequences allow easy solutions to difficult
> > problems. An example. Let the side of a square measure 10 royal
> > cubits. Draw a circle around it. How long is the circumference?
> > The side of the square measures 10 royal cubits or 70 palms.
> > My number column for the square root of 2 proposes a diagonal
> > of 99 palms. Now look up one of the above pi sequences. In the
> > lower line is found the number 99, above stays the number 311,
> > hence the circumference of the circle around the square of side
> > length 10 royal cubits measures practically 311 palms, with
> > a tiny mistake of less than 1/7 millimeters! A brillant result,
> > no formulas required, all one has to do is to look up a number
> > column and a number sequence.
> >
> > But of course my number columns are trash (John Horton Conway,
> > then holder of the Von Neumann Chair at Princeton); listening
> > to me and Domingo Gomez Morin pondering the realm of number
> > patterns is like listening to a flea and a louse arguing
> > (can't remember who wrote that); arguing with me is throwing
> > pearls before swine (David Fowler of Cambridge, Massachusetts,
> > an expert on Greek mathematics at Platon's Academy); my work
> > is numerology, pyramidology, and so on, and so on, and so on.
> >
> > My crime was to attest a mathematical knowledge to the Egyptians
> > and Babylonians. Mentioning the number of the circle pi and the
> > golden number phi in the context of the Great Pyramid at Giza
> > was bad enough, but to show how these numbers could have been
> > approximated, and quite easily so, was the worst of crimes.
> >
> > Fred Rickey, a teaching professor of mathematics and the "owner"
> > of the math-history list, informed me via e-mail that Egyptian
> > mathematics doesn't really belong to the history of mathematics.
> > I went on considering Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics parts
> > of the history of mathematics, most valuable ones, worth of being
> > explored in a fresh way, by means of new approaches, and this,
> > of course, meant my finl banning from the math-history list.
> >
> > I go on believing that a prospering global society requires,
> > among other things, a fair history of civilization.
> >
> > Franz Gnaedinger www.seshat.ch