MYSTERIES OF THE EQUILATERAL TRIANGLE - HIKARI Ltd

Biographical Vignettes 169
Electricity and Magnetism (1873) although most of this work was done at
Glenlair. It took until 1886 for Heinrich Hertz to produce the electromagnetic
waves mathematically predicted by Maxwell’s equations. Maxwell’s legacy
to us also includes the Maxwell distribution, Maxwell materials, Maxwell’s
theorem, the generalized Maxwell model and Maxwell’s demon. He died of
abdominal cancer at Cambridge, aged 48.
Vignette 25 (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson/Lewis Carroll:1832-1898).
C. L. Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, was born in Daresbury, Cheshire, England
[52]. He matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, graduating in 1854 and
becoming Master of Arts there three years later. In 1852, while still an undergraduate,
he won a Fellowship (allowing him to live in Christ Church College
provided that the took Holy Orders and remained unmarried, both of which
he did) and, in 1855, he was appointed Lecturer in Mathematics at his alma
mater, where he stayed in various capacities until his death. His mathematical
contributions included Elementary Treatise on Determinants (1867), A Discussion
of the Various Procedures in Conducting Elections (1873), Euclid and
His Modern Rivals (1879), The Game of Logic (1887), Curiosa Mathematica
(1888/1893) and Symbolic Logic (1896). Despite these many and varied publications,
he is best remembered for his children’s stories Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872). Incidentally,
Martin Gardner’s most commercially successful books were his annotations of
these children’s classics. Even more interesting is that he was asked to undertake
this publication venture only after the publishers could not get their
first choice - Bertrand Russell! Dodgson/Carroll’s predilection for paper folding
was alluded to in Recreation 28. He died suddenly from what began as a
minor cold in Guildford, Surrey, England, aged 65.
Vignette 26 (Hermann Amandus Schwarz: 1843-1921).
Hermann Schwarz was born in Hermsdorf, Silesia (now part of Poland)
[144]. Initially, he studied chemistry at the Technical University of Berlin
but switched to Mathematics, receiving his doctorate in 1864 for a thesis in
algebraic geometry written under Weierstrass and examined by Kummer (his
eventual father-in-law). He then taught at University of Halle and ETH-Zurich
until accepting the Chair of Mathematics at Göttingen in 1875. In 1892, he
returned to University of Berlin as Professor of Mathematics. His greatest
strength lay in his geometric intuition as is evidenced by his first publication,
an elementary proof of the chief theorem of axonometry (a method for mapping
three-dimensional images onto the plane). He made important contributions to
conformal mappings and minimal surfaces. His legacy to Mathematics is vast:
Schwarz alternating method, Schwarzian derivative, Schwarz’ lemma, Schwarz
minimal surface, Schwarz-Christoffel formula, Cauchy-Schwarz inequality and