Re: [math-fun] Martin Gardner archive
Are any math-funsters in California area in a position to help me out with a bit of archival research? Or for that matter are any math-funsters in New Jersey in a position to help me by asking John Conway a question or two? I'm trying to follow up on a recent posting to this forum by Thane Plambeck, describing his discovery of a letter from Martin Gardner to David Klarner dated 4 Oct 1983, in which Martin asks David what he knows about the problem of tiling a triangle of dots of side n with tiles consisting of either 3 dots in a row or 3 dots forming a triangle. I want to trace the history of this problem (which Conway and Lagarias discussed in an article called "Tiling with Polyominoes and Combinatorial Group Theory" that had a huge impact on my career). I can't reach Conway, and Lagarias says (paraphrased) "I don't know, and if you want to ask Conway, you'll probably have to come to Princeton and go to the math tea if you want to track him down; he's not taking phone calls or answering email these days." (I should mention that I also sent my question to Conway by snail-mail a couple of months ago; no reply.) I suspect that Conway learned about the problem from Gardner or Klarner and then forgot to include an attribution when he wrote the article with Lagarias (perhaps because he'd forgotten it), or perhaps the attribution never got included because Lagarias did most of the actual writing (and he may not have been aware of where Conway had gotten the problem from). Anyway, I'd love to find out that Conway learned about the problem either directly or indirectly from Gardner, because this would be a new example of the deep influence Gardner had on my mathematical career --- and I could cite this in October when I attend my local Celebration of Mind event. Can anyone help me out? A Californian could look through Gardner's correspondence with Klarner and Conway from the early to mid 80's; a New Jerseyite could drop in on departmental tea for a few days (or maybe beard Conway in his Fine Hall lair during office hours, or catch him before or after a class). I should also say that, if there turns out to be a definite path from Gardner's work to the Conway-Lagarias article, I would write an article about this for the College Mathematics Journal (describing how one ripple from the Conway-Lagarias article led eventually to some work of Kenyon, Okounkov, and Sheffield that was cited by the Fields Institute when they awarded Okounkov a Fields Medal a few years ago); any math-funster (or anyone else for that matter) who contributed some legwork at Stanford or Princeton would be effusively thanked in print. By the way, I went to http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/spc/xml/sc0647.xml but Mozilla said "Error loading stylesheet: Parsing an XSLT stylesheet failed" and Safari simply gave me a blank screen. Thanks, Jim Propp
ctl-U (view source) shows something that looks like it's intended to be an index. Just in case everyone hasn't heard already, the G4G folks are "organizing" the Martin Gardner Celebration of Mind to be held globally on October 21. Look for a get-together in your area! www.g4g-com.org Rich ------- Quoting James Propp <jpropp@cs.uml.edu>:
By the way, I went to http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/spc/xml/sc0647.xml but Mozilla said "Error loading stylesheet: Parsing an XSLT stylesheet failed" and Safari simply gave me a blank screen.
Thanks,
Jim Propp
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This letter is included in the Klarner papers that I sent in January 2010 to the University of Calgary, where Richard K Guy arranged for them to be archived in the Strens Collection. http://www.ucalgary.ca/lib-old/SpecColl/strens.htm Apollonia Steele, recently retired as an archivist there, nevertheless made an index of all this Klarner stuff, and sent me a copy of her index in May 2010. I think I recognize which item is the letter in her index. I'm not sure about the date of the letter. I think it is mid to late 1980s. Anyway, I'm about to forward Apollonia's index to Jim. If you Google "two 3-point tiling problems" (in quotation marks) you'll get a single hit, a link to an XLS spreadsheet that might possibly be relevant (I can't open it on the computer I'm typing this message on). On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 10:52 PM, <rcs@xmission.com> wrote:
ctl-U (view source) shows something that looks like it's intended to be an index.
Just in case everyone hasn't heard already, the G4G folks are "organizing" the Martin Gardner Celebration of Mind to be held globally on October 21. Look for a get-together in your area! www.g4g-com.org
Rich -------
Quoting James Propp <jpropp@cs.uml.edu>:
By the way, I went to http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/spc/xml/sc0647.xml but Mozilla said "Error loading stylesheet: Parsing an XSLT stylesheet failed" and Safari simply gave me a blank screen.
Thanks,
Jim Propp
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-- Thane Plambeck tplambeck@gmail.com http://thaneplambeck.typepad.com/
Jim, You can contact: Stan Isaacs <stan@isaacs.com> who was involved in organizing all the Gardner papers at Stanford. I expect he'll know who there you can ask to volunteer for the job. George http://momath.org/ http://georgehart.com/ On 9/30/2010 1:07 AM, James Propp wrote:
Are any math-funsters in California area in a position to help me out with a bit of archival research? ...
participants (4)
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George W. Hart -
James Propp -
rcs@xmission.com -
Thane Plambeck