Consultation

A letter from Lewis Carroll to 14-year-old Wilton Rix:

Honoured Sir,

Understanding you to be a distinguished algebraist (i.e. distinguished from other algebraists by different face, different height, etc.), I beg to submit to you a difficulty which distresses me much.

If x and y are each equal to ‘1,’ it is plain that 2 × (x2 – y2) = 0, and also that 5 × (x – y) = 0.

Hence 2 × (x2 – y2) = 5 × (x – y).

Now divide each side of this equation by (x – y).

Then 2 × (x + y) = 5.

But (x + y) = (1 + 1), i.e. = 2.

So that 2 × 2 = 5.

Ever since this painful fact has been forced upon me, I have not slept more than 8 hours a night, and have not been able to eat more than 3 meals a day.

I trust you will pity me and will kindly explain the difficulty to

Your obliged, Lewis Carroll

| Literature · Science & Math

Line Handling

http://books.google.com/books?id=9jVEAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false

“If you can describe clearly without a diagram the proper way of making this or that knot, then you are a master of the English tongue.” — Hilaire Belloc

| Language

A Novel Defense

In 1867, a Boston family paid its servant Bridget McDonald $38 in bank bills. A Martin O’Malley “asked her to let him take the money and count it, she not being able to read or write.” When she obliged, he refused to return the bills and threatened to burn them unless she opened the door. She did, and he went off with the money.

O’Malley was prosecuted for larceny, but the trial court seemed to feel that he was actually guilty of embezzlement, since he hadn’t taken the money from Bridget but merely kept it against her will. So it acquitted him.

A jury then convicted O’Malley of embezzlement, but he appealed — claiming that the act amounted to larceny. And apparently he went free.

(To prevent such injustices, many legislatures eventually combined larceny, embezzlement, and false pretenses into a single offense called theft.)

| Crime

The Paradox of Non-Punishment

Suppose counterfeiting carried a mandatory life sentence. In the face of such a severe penalty, no one counterfeits, and thus the penalty is never imposed. This is a desirable outcome, and yet most of us would not wish to live in such a society. Why?

“A law can be unjust even if it is never applied,” writes Saul Smilansky. “But someone can hardly be a victim of unjust punishment when no punishment occurs!”

| Society

Forked Tongues

From the New Englander and Yale Review, January 1843: “The great etymological affinity between Italian and Latin, is illustrated by the following lines addressed to Venice, by a citizen of that republic before its fall, which read equally in both languages”:

Te saluto, alma Dea, Dea generosa,
O gloria nostra, O Veneta Regina!
In procelloso turbine funesto
Tu regnasti secura; mille membra
Intrepida prostrasti in pugna acerba.
Per te miser non fui, per te non gemo;
Vivo in pace per te. Regna, O beata,
Regna in prospera sorte, in alta pompa,
In augusto splendore, in aurea sede.
Tu serena, tu placida, tu pia,
Tu benigna; tu salva, ama, conserva.

A reader of Notes and Queries, August 1868, presents these lines as “being at the same time Latin, Italian, and Portuguese”:

In mare irato, in subita procella,
Invoco te, nostra benigna Stella.
Vivo in acerba poena, in maesto horrore,
Quando te non imploro, in te non spero,
Purissima Maria, et in sincero
Te non adoro, et in divino ardore.
Et, O vita beata, et anni et horae
Quando, contra me armato odio severo
Te, Maria, amo, et in gaudio vero
Vivere spero ardendo in vivo amore.
Non amo te, regina augusta, quando
Non vivo in pace et in silentio fido;
Non amo te, quando non vivo amando.
In te sola, Maria, in te confido,
In tua materna cura respirando,
Quasi columba in suo beato nido.

| Language

Pith and Vinegar

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stevenson_and_Korean_officials_at_USAF_base_in_Korea,_March_1953.jpg

At a Houston Baptist convention on the campaign trail, Adlai Stevenson was told, “Governor Stevenson, we want to make it clear you are here as a courtesy, because Dr. Norman Vincent Peale has instructed us to vote for your opponent.”

Stevenson said, “Speaking as a Christian, I find the Apostle Paul appealing and the Apostle Peale appalling.”

| History

On Target

Samuel Isaac Jones offered this poser in his 1929 book Mathematical Wrinkles:

Cook was within 10 miles of the north pole and Peary was also within 10 miles of the pole, but 20 miles from Cook. What direction was Peary from Cook? Suppose Peary threw a ball at Cook and hit him. In what direction did the ball go?

He omitted the answer, apparently inadvertently. What is it?

| Puzzles

Enough

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Muir_Cane.JPG

Overhearing a group of scientists praising financier E.H. Harriman during an 1899 expedition to Alaska, John Muir interrupted them.

“I don’t think Mr. Harriman is very rich,” he said. “He has not as much money as I have. I have all I want, and Mr. Harriman has not.”

| Society