From: dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM)
Date: Sat, 10 Jan 1998 09:32:13 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: rant on the morality of confidentiality (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <199801091729.LAA09084@einstein.ssz.com>
Message-ID: <17F3ie27w165w@bwalk.dm.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com> writes:

> > From: dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM)
>
> > I'm sorry, I don't have the time to look this up. If you're trying to prove
> > that Gauss was not a nice person, I don't believe it.
>
> Anyone who would tell their dying wife, via their son, to wait a moment
> until he had finished his calculations is not a nice person.

Do you have proof that Gauss did that?  This sounds like another one of
those urban legends the envious sheeple like to invent about celebrities,
like the claim that Leonrado da Vinci was a cocksucker.

> > argument you can make is to cite Bolyai's claims that Lobachevsky was not
> > a real person but a "tentacle" of Gauss, created to persecute Bolyai
> > (gee, that sounds vaguely familiar...), and you can't find any more dirt
> > on Gauss, then it proves to me that he was indeed a remarkably nice person.
>
> What the hell are you talking about here? I made no such claims at all.

You're citing janos Bolyai, who claimed exactly that.  Unfortunately, the
poor chap went insane.

> > You also haven't explained how Bolyai could have been Gauss's school friend
> > being 25 years younger.
>
> Bolyai's father worked with Gauss (as I explained) and his son John also
> worked with Gauss from the time he (Bolyai) was in school; not Gauss.

You're confused, Jim.  Farkas Bolyai (the father) never claimed to have
invented non-euclidean geometry. He published a math textbook in 1829,
with an appendix credited to his son, Janos, which contained the results
published by Lobachevsky in 1829.  He's lucky we're not accusing him
of plagiarism.

> I am going to refrain from going on with the remainder of your 'points'.

Because if you tried to do that, you would again expose your ignorance,
as you did when you tried arguing about Soviet-Japanese skirmishes in the
1930s.

Coward.

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps