History
The first known appearance of the jealous husbands problem is in the medieval text Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes, usually attributed to Alcuin (died 804.) In Alcuin's formulation the couples are brothers and sisters, but the constraint is still the same—no woman can be in the company of another man unless her brother is present., p. 74. From the 13th to the 15th century, the problem became known throughout Northern Europe, with the couples now being husbands and wives., pp. 291–293. The problem was later put in the form of masters and valets; the formulation with missionaries and cannibals did not appear until the end of the 19th century., p. 81 Varying the number of couples and the size of the boat was considered at the beginning of the 16th century., p. 296. Cadet de Fontenay considered placing an island in the middle of the river in 1879; this variant of the problem, with a two-person boat, was completely solved by Ian Pressman and David Singmaster in 1989.
Read more about this topic: Missionaries And Cannibals Problem
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)