Yeah, I was buoyed by having the formula confirmed (though I hadn't really doubted it). There were a few other times that my "discovery" turned out to be known for a very long time (like when I tried to define z^w for complex z and w), and eventually it sank it that it wasn't so easy to come up with something in math that wasn't already known! --Dan Mike Stay wrote: << On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 12:57 PM, Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote: << Still, all excited about this formula, I told it to my freshman advisor, Henry McKean, on the first day we met. He casually reached over to his bookshelf, and after flipping a few pages showed me the identical formula in Whittaker an Watson from 70 years earlier. You've never seen an MIT freshman's bubble burst so quickly.
Whenever that happened to me, I was just glad that I was on the right track!
________________________________________________________________________________________ "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." --Groucho Marx