| Thirty-nine seconds seems longer than
the text suggests. Did Holmes round off? mis-calculate? Are the
posts not
|
| 60 yards apart? A teacher might want to
construct (or ask students to build) a web page for
students to explore |
| the
underlying Diophantine equation (next page). |
| There's a different problem with Holmes'
archenemy. In The Final Problem
Professor Moriarty is described as
|
| "He is a man
of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a
phenomenal mathematical
|
| faculty. At the age of
twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the Binomial Theorem, which
has had a European |
| vogue. On the strength of it he won the Mathematical
Chair at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all |
| appearance, a most brilliant career before him." |
|
In
The Valley
of Fear Moriarty is also credited with "Is he not the
celebrated author of The
Dynamics of an |
|
Asteroid, a book which
ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is
said that there was no man |
| in the
scientific press capable of criticizing it?" |
|
There has been some very informed speculation over the years
about models for Moriarty. |
|
© 2018 Peter F. Zoll. All rights reserved. |