a revolutionary class

maybe that's not the right adjective... nonetheless it was cool

we walk into experimental math class today, and the prof. begins with

"so i got an email... 30 minutes ago... so this is hot off the presses... here are your copies:"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

from ----@math.psu.edu Wed Oct 13 21:22:00 2004

Dear Doron, how are you? I wanted to attract your attention to a very strange paper that was posted a few days ago on ArXiv [see here]. Since it's in Russian, I take the liberty to very briefly describe it. This is a preprint of the Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the author is S. Sadov (no idea who he is). The main result is a criterion for a convex quadrilateral with sides a,b,c,d and diagonals p,q to be inscribed into a circle. It's not the well known Ptolemy theorem:

ac+bd=pq

but a cubic relation:

abp-bcq+cdp-adq=0.

The proof takes 28pp and makes use of Maple.

Any comment? Can you do it in one paragraph?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

so immediately, dr. z. shows us some maple packages he's written, one of which proves the Ptolemy theorem refered to in the email... we spend the first half hour of class modifying it to get the cubic relation in this paper. turns out, the computer can prove it too.

so some Russian mathematician has worked hard for awhile to come up with a 28 page proof of a geometry theorem, and recently gotten his work published... my experimental math prof hears about his proof, and within the hour gets a class full of graduate students to prove it in a paragraph using only the computer. -- how ironic and cool is that?

this is why experimental math rocks :-)

that, and dr. z. gives us money for good answers... i earned a penny today :-P

later dudes.