as I've told Gosper & co, I had invented in an unfinished paper (that I've occasionally been fiddling with for many years) my own ideas about what I called the "matprod framework" for function approximation based on matrix products... but had kept getting the feeling the Gosper had somehow been there ahead of me. Now that I finally see Gosper's ideas, wow! In a lot of ways he WAS there ahead of me, plus his whole "path invariance" PaIn idea had never occurred to me and is really something much vaster than what I'd been working on (which was merely function approximation and algorithms). I can hardly comprehend the implications of PaIn, he has evidently found something incredibly vast here, but it seems plausible that only the tiniest fraction of it has yet been explored. For one example, he illustrates the path invariance idea on a "square grid"; but what about in the "continuum limit" as the grid side --> 0? Wouldn't that be a whole new kind of analysis? This is serious. This really could be the missing setting people have been wanting to do theoretical physics, and heaven knows what else. I had once seen the version in the Chudnovsky book, but had dismissed it as basically just random ravings. It's an outrage they printed that version.

The arboricidal version is

Gosper, R. Wm., Strip Mining in the Abandoned Orefields of Nineteenth Century Mathematics, Computers in Mathematics, (D. Chudnovsky & R. Jenks, eds.), Lecture Notes in Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol 125 (1990), p282. but they printed my earliest draft instead of one of the many revisions I sent during the long publication delay.  Better: http://www.tweedledum.com/rwg/stanfordn1.pdf http://www.tweedledum.com/rwg/stanfordn2.pdf http://www.tweedledum.com/rwg/stanfordn3.pdf http://www.tweedledum.com/rwg/stanfordn4.pdf (The machine I TeXed them on was too microcephalic  to typeset more than a handful of pages per file!  And it couldn't import graphics--there are some  missing lines and a curve that were drawn by hand.) --rwg