History
Most people attribute the introduction of outer billiards to Bernhard Neumann in the late 1950s, though it seems that a few people cite an earlier construction in 1945, due to M. Day. Jürgen Moser popularized the system in the 1970s as a toy model for celestial mechanics. This system has been studied classically in the Euclidean plane, and more recently in the hyperbolic plane. One can also consider higher dimensional spaces, though no serious study has yet been made. Bernhard Neumann informally posed the question as to whether or not one can have unbounded orbits in an outer billiards system, and Moser put it in writing in 1973. Sometimes this basic question has been called the Moser-Neumann question. This question, originally posed for shapes in the Euclidean plane and solved only recently, has been a guiding problem in the field.
Read more about this topic: Outer Billiard
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“As I am, so shall I associate, and so shall I act; Caesar’s history will paint out Caesar.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“Three million of such stones would be needed before the work was done. Three million stones of an average weight of 5,000 pounds, every stone cut precisely to fit into its destined place in the great pyramid. From the quarries they pulled the stones across the desert to the banks of the Nile. Never in the history of the world had so great a task been performed. Their faith gave them strength, and their joy gave them song.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)