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archive:humor:odd_to.obs

Odd to Obscurity

by M. Gemignani

Gauss, Euler, and Hilbert - we often read about the great mathematicians, but rarely about the thousands who toil in total obscurity. While it is obviously fitting to pay homage to the truly great, once in a while we should pause to honor common banality, if for no other reason than that it is so abundant and prolific. To pay homage to the mediocre multitude, I have selected a few of its most average representatives and here present a short summary of the work that made then totally unknown so that they might serve as an inspiration and consolation to us all.

Luigi Testadura (c. 1756 - ?). Even Testadura's mother was not sure when he was born, and nobody really missed him when he died, thus the confusion about his birth and death dates. For all we know, he might still be alive. His most ignored work is his proof of the irrationality of mathematics, which still remains to be read in the original Italian. His equally unknown "Table of Even Integers from 2 to 200" has yet to be duplicated. Since he was a polite male chauvinist, Testadura held many chairs throughout Italy; even so, most people considered him a crashing boar* at the dinner table.

Henri Malchance (1853-1801). Malchance was often ridiculed for constantly looking backward and living in the past. Nevertheless, he was the first to envision modern computers and invented Malchance's loop, which is still in vogue among many students in computer courses today:

      1 GOTO 2;
      2 GOTO 1.

He consistently used such words as "stop", "go", and "end", words which form an important part of the computer literature today. He died of a broken heart after he computed pi to 2 million places and then couldn't get anyone to check his addition.

Oskar Kopfwehundleerevongluck (1895-1931). Kopfee (as he was known to his dog) was a forerunner of the renowned Murphy; Kopfee would have been the first to publish Murphy's Law, which then would have been known as Kopfwehundleerevon- gluck's Law, but the secretary typing his manuscript ran off with his wife, the original manuscript was destroyed in a fire, a replacement was lost in the mail, and the journal in which it was to appear was shut down by the police. Undaunted, Kopfee turned his talent to prove Euclid's fifth postulate and showing that pi is an integer. He hurled himself into the Rhine after his rope broke in an unsuccessful attempt to hang himself upon learning he was not to receive tenure at the mail order university where he was an assistant envelope stuffer.

Chambers Cadaver (1847-1901). Cadaver was an obscure English musician who was an total unknown as a mathematician. Despite the fact that he attended both Oxford and Cambridge, not a single instructor there would admit to having had him in his class. Cadaver submitted no less than twenty papers to the Royal Society; these went unrefereed until his death, at which time they were thrown away. According to on commentator on his life, "No one would have read them anyway and who would have paid the page charges?" All that remains of Cadaver's works are the titles of three of his lesser works: "A proof of Fermat's last theorem", "The four color problem solved", and "A discourse on the continuum hypothesis and the axiom of choice and a proof that they are indeed independent".

/data/webs/external/dokuwiki/data/pages/archive/humor/odd_to.obs.txt · Last modified: 1999/08/01 17:16 by 127.0.0.1

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