English versionCommençons par ma collection de 17, mise à jour le 7 mars 1998. Cette page HTML ne contient pas les propriétés mathématiques de 17. Pour avoir la liste complète sur les 17, il vous faut la version LaTeX:
Si vous avez d'autres 17 intéressants, vous pouvez me les envoyer.
Note: ce site a participé aux Webs d'Or 96 sous le numéro 1207 = 17 × 71.
Ma page sur les cochons jaunes.
Vous voulez certainement savoir d'où viennent les 17 et les cochons jaunes. Laissons parler Daniel Loeb...
Ah, there are two mathematicians. David C. Kelly and
Mike Spivak. They were graduate students together at Princeton (?)
in the 1960's. They reportedly got the yellow pig 17 idea at a bar.
Since then, Mike Spivak has become a famous author of math text
books and has hidden
a yellow pig in each book. (eg. one book is
dedicated to a chinese (yellow
) policeman (pig
)) and another
has a reference to Steve Neen (?) in the index referring to a
page in which he goes whole hog and lets n tend towards infinity
or something like that.
David Kelly got involved in summer math programs. Here is some history
of that from Larry Carter....
The answer is, it's probably impossible. In any case, Kelly set up
Hampshire by a process of successive improvements. Let me try to recount
the History of
HCSSiM,
although my knowledge of it is incomplete and inaccurate.
Sometime around 1957, possibly in response to the Russian's
launching of Sputnik, a summer program was set up at
St. Paul's School, a prep school
in New Hampshire. High school students from all over
N.H. came to study their favorite
subject. They were also subjected to English classes, daily chapel,
mandatory sports, and lights out at 10:30. I suspect that the fact that
the program was at a high school, was staffed by high school teachers,
and targeted to a state, all made it simpler to start. (Dan: if you want
to find out how that program got set up - it still exists - you can write
to the Advanced Studies Program,
St. Paul's School, Concord,
N.H. 03301. Alan Hall was the
original director.)
So we've got state funding, decent (but not Hampshire-caliber) students
and faculty, and a pretty campus. Sometime in the early 60's, Kelly found
a summer job teaching math there. He set about revising the curriculum,
away from freshman math and towards Neat Stuff. Also, whenever he found
someone who seemed to love math, he encouraged them to teach there (I
joined in '67). I think the
NSF funding
started coming in under Kelly's reign (the
NSF was bursting
with money in those days.)
So now we have a dedicated staff (Dan Heisey and Dave Gay,
among others.) I think what happened next is that the
NSF declared that
they would no longer fund programs that were restricted to a single state,
or maybe just St. Paul's Rules and
Regulations got to be too much. In any case, Kelly and Dan Heisey applied
to the NSF and got
funding to set up a program at UNH, where Dan was a professor.
Kelly's staff of course followed and were joined by Mike Spivak and
the Yellow Pig. Students applied since the
NSF advertised it
along with all the other so-called Summer Studies Training Programs.
This lasted two years (68 and 69), at which point UNH
decided they didn't need Kelly, that they could have a more organized
program without him, or something like that. They tried in '70, and were
wrong. So even though Hampshire College didn't exist at the time, Kelly's
proposal to set up a program at Hampshire in '71 was approved by the
NSF. From then on,
it was mostly easy, since students became staff and word of mouth brings
more students. The only hard part was trying to survive during the years
the NSF couldn't
support the program. But alumni contributions and Hampshire's reduced
charges for the facilities (plus a high tuition) allowed the program to
muddle through.
Kelly gives a talk at each program about seventeen. The program visits
his home (in groups) a couple of times. He has a collection of mathematical
toys larger than any particular game shop I have seen. In addition he has
somewhere between 289 and 4913 yellow pigs lying around his house.
People have tried coming up with rival numbers (eg. 23); however,
Kelly beat them in a competition. The rivals had to name a property of 23,
and Kelly (and Don Goldberg) would reply with at least 2 similar
properties of 17.... In the end, the rivals ran out of interesting
properties!
Si vous ne comprenez pas l'anglais, vous pouvez en lire une traduction rapide.
