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:
“History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)