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:
“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)
“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)