See this biographical page on Hermes: http://www.viswiki.com/en/Johann_Gustav_Hermes On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 9:18 AM, Victor Miller <victorsmiller@gmail.com> wrote:
The story that I heard about this was the following (which might be highly garbled): there was a grad student at Goettingen assigned to Hilbert (I believe) who was rather marginal. Hilbert wanted to find a non-brutal way of telling him to disappear, so he assigned him the problem of coming up with an explicit construction of a 65537-gon, which was known to be doable in principal. He disappeared for a number of years and then returned with a large stack of beautifully drafted illustrations of the construction. Hilbert felt that since he had solved the problem that was assigned that he was morally obligated to award him his thesis. It was placed in a glass case in the Goettingen library. During the bombing in WWII the library sustained heavy damage, but the construction in its case emerged unscathed!
Victor
On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 5:59 PM, Fred lunnon <fred.lunnon@gmail.com> wrote:
Nicely done --- but I think I'll stick to trig functions.
It said in a book (I know not what) that some XIX-th century hero attacked the construction of the regular 65537-gon; apparently "His manuscript is preserved in the University of Goettingen."
Just a thought ... WFL
On 4/15/10, Thane Plambeck <tplambeck@gmail.com> wrote:
this appeared on the wikipedia a few weeks ago, it looks like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Regular_Heptadecagon_Inscribed_in_a_Circle...
-- Thane Plambeck tplambeck@gmail.com http://thaneplambeck.typepad.com/
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