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Dedication
This text is dedicated to every high school
mathematics
teacher whose high standards
and sense of professional
ethics have resulted
in personal attacks upon their character
and/or
professional integrity.
Find comfort in the exchange between Richard
Rich and
Sir Thomas More in the play A Man For All Seasons
by Robert Bolt.
Rich: “And if I were (a good teacher), who would
know it?”
More: “You, your pupils, your friends, God.
Not a bad public, that …”
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John Napier, Canon of Logarithms, 1614
“Seeing there is nothing that is so troublesome to mathematical practice,
nor doth more molest and hinder calculators, than the multiplications,
divisions, square and cubical extractions of great numbers, which besides
the tedious expense of time are for the most part subject to many slippery
errors, I began therefore to consider in my mind by what certain and ready
art I might remove those hindrances…Cast away from the work itself even the
very numbers themselves that are to be multiplied, divided, and resolved
into roots, and putteth other numbers in their place which perform much as
they can do, only by addition and subtraction, division by two or division
by three.”
As quoted in “When Slide Rules Ruled” by Cliff Stoll,
Scientific American Magazine, May 2006, pgs. 81-83