From: "JACK L. URETSKY (C)1998; HEP DIVISION, ARGONNE NATIONAL LAB ARGONNE, IL 60439" <JLU@hep.anl.gov>
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 13:22:51 -0600
Hi all-
OK. I've never been a friend of apocryphal stories because, in
my experience, they (a) never happened, (b) could not have happened, and
(c) are usually invented by people who don't know what they are talking
about. So here is my challenge: give a non-trivial definition of
"absolute value" that makes sense out of this story.
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Second, in answer to Richard Grandy's question: "Perhaps you could give
an example of what other choices we might have made in inventing the
negative or irrational numbers." I'll report a story I heard about a
mathematics student who followed up the classroom introduction to
complex numbers by asking about "the number whose absolute value is
-1." The professor, I'm told, followed it up by working with the class
to invent a number system based on this new number.
--
___________
Dr. David W. Steyert steyert_dw@mercer.edu
Department of Chemistry (912)-752-4173
Mercer University
Macon, GA 31207
___________
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Regards,
Jack
"I scored the next great triumph for science myself,
to wit, how the milk gets into the cow. Both of us
had marveled over that mystery a long time. We had
followed the cows around for years - that is, in the
daytime - but had never caught them drinking fluid of
that color."
Mark Twain, Extract from Eve's
Autobiography