Last year many Americans were recalling the 50th anniversary of
the assassination of President Kennedy. An article in the Providence
Journal by Tom Mooney had this sad heading : " JFK's presidency loses
relevance with younger generations " ( Nov. 20 , 2013 ) The last
melancholy sentence read : " After all, who remembers much about James
A. Garfield or William McKinley? " A newspaper column written by some
obscure scholar pointed out that Garfield had a brilliant mind.
Spotting the very high school Plane Geometry text I had in 1963 at
the URI library in downtown Providence, I had a Proustian memory not of
Kennedy but of Garfield. Quickly I found the very page: here was an
original proof of the Pythagorean Theorem presented by none other than
President James A. Garfield. A quite elegant proof !
The significance of the Pythagorean Theorem was made
clear by a famous scene in " The Wizard Oz ". Upon receiving the
wizard' s diploma , Scarecrow got it all wrong : " The sum of the square
roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square
root of the remaining side ". Garfield would have immediately smelled a
charlatan wizard. And Scarecrow, of course, was just as stupid with
the Oz diploma.
But old Euclid is not a footnote to history. He
inspired both Albert Einstein and Abraham Lincoln in sound principles of
logic and reasoning. How many of our leaders in Congress today ever
find instruction and amusement in a plane geometry textbook ?
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Ron