Next message: Fred Hebard: "Re: Pointers"
On Oct 8, 2004, at 1:22 PM, George Huxtable wrote:
> By the way, there's a recent book out in paperback, "The Measure of All
> Things", by Ken Alder (Abacus 2003 or 2004), about the French attempts
> to
> define the length of the metre by accurately surveying the radius of
> the
> Earth, along the meridian through Paris, from Dunkerque to Barcelona,
> in
> Revolutionary times (1790s). This used Borda circles.
The heart of the drama in Alder's book, which was very real to Mechain,
is about a new form of error that crept into the measurements using the
circle. This was ultimately uncovered by Legendre, who analyzed the
data. It is interesting to me that all these great mathematicians such
as Euler, Gauss & Legendre were analyzing data back in those days. I
get the impression that mathematicians nowadays are bored by data, and
leave that to mere statisticians. And now even the statisticians seem
bored by data!
