Who really solved 140-year old maths problem? - March 07, 2008
Earlier this week an interesting maths press release popped up in my inbox. Despite the nice premise – researcher solves problem that has vexed community for 140 years – I didn’t cover it.
The reason for this was the actual research paper was nearly a year old. Who, I reasoned, would want to read about something a year old. Well plenty of people did cover it, and there has since emerged and interesting twist...
Science’s coverage adds a classic science bun-fight: a row over who actually got there first.
In the paper from March last year Darren Crowdy, a mathematician at Imperial College London, set out a modification of the Schwarz-Christoffel formula. This formula is used in conformal mapping, a process which maps one object onto another. Crowdy’s work proposed a way the formula can be made to work for objects containing holes.
“I was in Paris listening to a talk when it suddenly came to me. It just clicked. I stood up and left the room. I was so excited that I had to get up to work on it there and then,” says Crowdy in The Times.
Does this matter? If does if you’re the American mathematicians John Pfaltzgraff, Thomas DeLillo and Alan Elcrat. According to Science they “say they had the basic strategy--and a formula—first”.
Playing peacemaker, Michael Siegel of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, tells Science, “It’s a breakthrough, and all these people contributed.”
Titbit: Crowdy’s webpage at Imperial lists DeLillo as a collaborator.
Comments
Prof Crowdy puts his side of the story in an interview on Nature Network London.
Posted by: Matt | March 10, 2008 04:37 PM