President Garfield- a footnote to a footnote in history

   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 ?