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    The American Mathematical Monthly Volume 99, Number 9 / NOVEMBER 1992 (ISSN 0002-9890) Contents ARTICLES Giants / CATHLEEN S. MORAWETZ 819 Euclidean Quadratic Fields / R. B. EGGLETON, C. B. LACAMPAGNE, and J. L. SELFRIDGE 829 Overview of Mathematical Social Sciences / K. H. KIM, F. W. ROUSH, and M. D. INTRILIGATOR = 838 OP Abner Has Done It Again / RICHARD J. FRIEDLANDER 845 Sequential Partitioning / MARK F. SCHILLING 846 Goldbach’s Problem in the Ring M,(Z) / JUN WANG 856 A Complex Rolle’s Theorem / J.-CL. EVARD and F. JAFARI 858 FEATURES COMMENTS 818 PICTURE PUZZLE 862 THE AUTHORS 863 LETTERS 865 UNSOLVED PROBLEMS The Opaque Cube Problem / KENNETH A. BRAKKE 866 PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS 872 REVIEWS Old and New Unsolved Problems in Plane Geometry and Number Theory by Victor Klee and Stan Wagon / P. R. HALMOS = 885 Problems for Mathematicians Young and Old by Paul R. Halmos / STAN WAGON 888 TELEGRAPHIC REVIEWS 891 NOTICE TO AUTHORS The Monthly publishes articles, notes, and other fea: tures about mathematics and the profession. The readership of the Monthly is intended to include ev- erybody who is mathematically inclined, including of course professional mathematicians and students of mathematics at all collegiate levels. While no single article or feature is likely to appeal to everyone, mate- tial should interest and be accessible to a large num ber of readers. This is the most important criterion for acceptance. Articles may be expositions of old results or presenta tions of new ones. They may concern all of mathe: matics or one small area. a broad development or a single application, historical reminiscences or one important event. While some articles may contain the author's new research, the novelty of material and generality of the results is far less important than the Clarity of exposition and general interest. Discussing one illuminating case of a well known result is far better than providing all the details of an obscure but new proposition. Articles in the Monthly are sup posed to inform and to entertain; they are meant to be read rather than archived. Notes are short and possibly informal articles. A note may concern a clever new proof of an old theorem, a novel way to present tired material, or a lively discus sion of a philosophical (but still mathematical) issue. Also any topic is suitable, so long as it is related to mathematics. Because a note is short, the first few sentences are the most important part: They should explain the purpose and invite the reader in. Pho- tographs or diagrams often will attract the reader's attention, All articles and notes should be sent to the editor JOHN EWING, Department of Mathematics. Indiana University. Bloomington, IN 47405. Please send 3 copies. typewritten on only one side of the paper. illustrations should be carefully drawn on separate sheets of paper in black ink; the original should be without lettering and two copies should have appropriate captions and lettering indicated Proposed problems or solutions should be sent to: RICHARD BUMBY, P.O. Box 10971 New Brunswick, NJ 08906-0971 Please send 2 copies of all material possible. typewritten if Letters to the Editor, both for publication and for private reading. should be sent to the Editor at the address given above. Comments, including criti cisms, are welcome, as are all suggestions for mak ing tke Monthly a lively, entertaining, and informative journal. EDITOR: JOHN H. EWING ASSOCIATE EDITORS: RONALD BOOK PETER BORWEIN RICHARD BUMBY DENNIS DETURCK UNDERWOOD DUDLEY JOHN DUNCAN JOAN FERRINI-MUNDY JOSEPH GALLIAN STEVEN GALOVICH RICHARD GUY DARRELL HAILE PAUL HALMOS CATHERINE MCGEOCH RICHARD NOWAKOWSKI LEE RUBEL LYNN STEEN STAN WAGON DOUGLAS WEST HERBERT WILF EDITORIAL ASSISTANT: MISTY CUMMINGS STAFF ARTIST. MIKE CAGLE Reprint permission MARCIA P. SWARD, Executive Director Advertising Correspondence Ms. ELAINE PEDREIRA, Advertising Manager Subscription correspondence. change of address, and other inquiries: Membership / Subscriptions Department All at the address: The Mathematical Association of America 1529 Eighteenth Street, N.W. Washington, DC 20036. Microfilm Editions: University Microfilms international, Serial Bid coordinator, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106. The AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL MONTHLY (ISSN 0002-9890) is published monthly except bimonthly June-July and August-September by the Mathemati Cal Association of America at 1529 Eighteenth Street, (N.W., Washington, DC 20036 and Montpelier, VT. ‘Copyrighted by the Mathematical Association of America (incorporated). 1992, including rights to this journal issue as a whole and, except where otherwise noted, rights to each individual contribution. General permission is granted to Institutional Members of the MAA for noncommercial reproduction in limited quan- tities of individual articles (in whole or in pant) pro vided a complete reference is made to the source. Second class postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to the American Mathematical Monthly. Membership / Subscription Department, MAA, 1529 Eighteenth Street, N.W., Washington, DC, 20036- 1385 Cover: What is the least area surface that can block alll lines of sight through a unit cube? The cover shows the best known solution, with area about 4.2324. Martin Gardner offers a $50 prize for the best improvement on this. COMMENTS It’s that time of year again, half way through the recommendation season. We pull out our pens (or more likely our computers) to practice what used to be an art—writing a subtle, honest, and helpful evaluation. For many, however, the satisfaction of crafting a thoughtful letter has turned to the dread of piecing together a few stale paragraphs of hackneyed phrases. The only craftsmanship here is inventing ways to make a substantive statement about someone you have met only once at a conference. What’s behind this glut of words? Several authors have recently chided young mathe- maticians who, cager and desperate to find jobs, apply to hundreds of institutions. Their mentors and colleagues, eager and desperate to help, write letters that tell of breathtaking mathematical feats in exaggerated terms. (It is remarkable that some universities award Ph.D.’s to “the best student we have had in the past 20 years”—every year.) But with jobs so scarce, can we blame them? And after all, we have always written letters for mathemati- cians entering the job market (although they used to be much shorter—try looking at a dossier from 20 years ago). Sending 200 copies of the same letter is bad for trees, but it has little ill effect on the writer. The real cause of the glut comes at a later stage. We lack trust and the self-confidence to exercise judgment. Departments and deans demand an ever increasing number of letters of recommendation at every career decision—for renewal, for tenure, for promotion. At many universities, the numbers are daunting: 4 letters for the first appointment, 2 or 3 for renewal, 12 for tenure, and 12 for promotion to Full. Thirty letters for cach career. Do we need 12 letters (4 for the department and 8 for the dean) to make a tenure decision? If we are unconvinced by the first 6 (from those who know the candidate best), should we be convinced by the second 6 (from those who know the candidate in passing)? Why is the dean more convinced by outside letters than by inside opinions? And why does the department rely so heavily on “experts”, who know the candidate slightly, rather than on close associates and colleagues, who know the candidate well? (Indeed, some place more faith on a few sentences from an anonymous referee of a grant proposal than on the testimony of a colleague; the referee is the “expert” after all.) Renewals and tenure decisions and promotions are matters of judgment, not endorse- ment. Forcing a dozen people to pretend to know a young mathematician’s work and abilities subverts a system that once worked well. (Do we need to send people copies of all publications if they know the work well?) The pretense forces writers to substitute fussy details about the mathematics for pithy comments about the person. Letters explain the technical terms in theorems, but fail to comment on the talents that proved them. Relying only on the judgments of “experts in the field” gives unfair advantage to those fields that have the greatest sense of self-importance, and the least sense of perspective. Letters of recommendation play an important role in making decisions about a mathe- matician’s career. Departments should treat those letters, however, as partial evidence in a complicated judgment; they should have confidence to make that judgment themselves rather than to let the letters do it for them. Deans who cannot trust departments have a serious problem, but they will not solve it by asking for more letters; they only produce more pieces of paper, with less content. We should remind those deans that sometimes, more is less and less is more. In this case, fewer letters surely will produce more information ... and better decisions. —John Ewing 818 Giants’ Cathleen S. Morawetz I could have chosen to speak about the progress and changes in applied mathemat- ics that have taken place in the years since the MAA was founded. I have chosen instead to speak about these particular giants of applied mathematics not only because they represent a certain period and a certain influence but because they attained their distinction in very different ways. These people divide into two groups. Those who did nothing or nearly nothing but applied mathematics and those who divided their time between pure and applied mathematics. The first kind is exemplified par excellence by Sir Geoffrey Taylor and Theodore von Karman (he might be annoyed to have the label mathematician) and the examples of the second kind are John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener and Kurt Friedrichs. I will also say if time permits a few words about my father, John L. Synge since there is no question that I learned a lot from him about attitude and action in applied mathematics. I might add that he was chairman of mathematics on this campus from 1943 to 1947. Before describing the first two of these men—I would like to say a word or two about the subject applied mathematics. This is a term that has different meanings attached to it by both its friends and enemies. Some people like to call it mathematics of the real world (an unattractive expression but at least fairly general), others think of it as being useful and still others use the term as equivalent to lack of rigor. I wish I could avoid the expression “applied” altogether, but it’s there and the meaning that I attach to it is: (1) It is mathematics. (2) It is connected to some other science including engineering science. I then proceed to strip it down and I exclude statistics. If I did not want to talk about v. Neumann I would also exclude computer science. And I think computer scientists would most definitely agree. The other sciences range all over: medicine, cryptography, economics, and I think we can be happy to embrace as much as we can. What distinguishes pure mathematics is that it is exploring mathematics for itself. But I have yet to see in the flesh a pure mathematician who is not ecstatic with delight if someone can apply his result to some other science. So I have picked my giants mainly on the basis of this distinction between pure and applied. But I have also picked them on the basis of my own knowledge and I confess the possibility of reminiscing. I must have been interested at an early age in the struggles of the little department of applied mathematics in Toronto that my father chaired. As an 'This article is based on an address given by the author at the 75th anniversary of the founding of the MAA, Columbus, Ohio, in August 1990. 1992] GIANTS 819 undergraduate I remember asking him how many applied mathematicians there were in North America and he replied with the question “You mean excluding those who just do Laplace Transforms.” I have forgotten how many constituted the remainder but it was an insignificant minority of the mathematics community. Let me start with the oldest of my group and I'll bet an unsung hero in most mathematical halls. Geoffrey Ingram Taylor, born in 1886, was the grandson of George Boole, so mathematics cannot have been strange to him. He also had a mathematical aunt, Boole’s youngest daughter who published her first paper in geometry in her old age. (I imagine that her father was her teacher). Geoffrey Taylor took the natural science tripos not the mathematical tripos at Cambridge. I have wondered if he was not discouraged from pure mathematics by the situation of his distinguished grandfather who got his first position at the advanced age of 36 in that outpost of the British empire, the University of Cork in Ireland. Taylor received a fellowship at Cambridge in 1908 and there he stayed the rest of his life. In 1911 he was scientific crew for a trip to the Arctic on the H.MLS. Scotia. There he not only enjoyed the making of measurements in the middle of nature but he got started on his study of turbulence. He was fascinated by the outpouring of smoke from the ship’s funnel. I recently had the opportunity to get equally fascinated. Twice a day a local steamer plies its way past my summer cottage. And this is what I see on a windless day, Figure 1, and I suppose that is what Taylor saw. ee Figure 1. In the beginning you have a plume of smoke, a layer of air and under it a layer of hot air and smoke which has lower density and under that again air. Let us just look at one surface separating gas at different densities as in Figure 2a. Just think of these two layers between two walls separated by a surface S$ as in Figure 2b. If we displace the surface by changing its level then the increased pressure on the surface is the difference in the weight of the water above the surface and thus proportional to 5y(p, — p,) where dy is the difference in level. The acceleration of the surface will be proportional to this force. da gp PY = F(p2 ~ 1) By. If p, > p, there is exponential growth in time proportional to vk (p, — p,). If P2 , that makes the surface tilt still more. So it is more unstable. I won’t bore you with the large number of equations 820 GIANTS [November dsy dr y P2> PL | x Figure 2a, 2b, 2c (Top to Bottom). = (p2 = pi kby you have to write down to do this problem fully. You assume there is a ripple of some prescribed wave length in the surface, again as in Figure 2a and you find the corresponding exponents in time growth. There is no growth if p, aD TP ——<<<—= a b > ~D' ——$—> a Figure 3a, 3b, 3c. 822 GIANTS [November Cathleen S. Morawetz and her father, John L. Synge, on his 90th birthday. shed alternately on each side and a wave could not be avoided as in Figure 3b. He then proposed a simple model of a vortex street with regular spacings and equal strength vortices, Figure 3c. He found the very elegant result that if the spacing and the width of the street do not satisfy a very simple ratio condition then the array is unstable. Thus this pattern is the one that is seen. All others being unstable will not be seen. Enamored by the elegance of this theory I wanted to go to Caltech myself but since Caltech did not admit women in 1945 I landed up in Wiener’s class at MIT instead. But I met von Karman later. I had written a paper on the so-called limiting line which had been a proposed way of explaining why most transonic flow has shocks. I attributed the idea to von Karman in part without checking a reference and then proceeded to show that it could not be the explanation. I was actually following up some work of Friedrichs. The next time von Karman came to N.Y. he invited Courant and Friedrichs, Lax as a representative Hungarian and me to lunch in his hotel. Every few minutes he turned to me and asked where I had seen the limiting line proposition. I felt terrible and learned my lesson but from then on was treated very well by von Karman. His biggest role was as the father of our space program and the developer of rocketry. But wherever he could, he brought mathematics to bear. I think Friedrichs, or perhaps Courant told me that once when an admirer asked him about his successful mastery of a problem he patted a large pile of calculations meanwhile muttering “Physical intuition, physical intuition.” Let me turn now to the “other kind” of a giant and let me begin with Norbert Wiener. Probably most of you have read his autobiography. There is no question 1992] GIANTS 823 that his formative years were his childhood years and that his tastes and ambitions were a product of his struggle to be independent of his father. After graduating at the age of 14 from college, he tried graduate school in zoology but his clumsiness and bad eyesight made him realize that the experimen- tal science of that time was not for him. He tried philosophy then logic and finally ended in mathematics. His enormous talent took time to develop and it was not until he had made many starts, that he settled down by his own account to really study mathematics at the age of 24. Finally, he was appointed to the faculty of MIT. In the late twenties he went for a second time as a young post-doc to Gottingen where his, I was going to say arrogance but perhaps it’s better to say his particular mixture of self-esteem and lack of self-esteem led Hilbert to try to “cure” him with scorn. The Hilbert entourage followed suit and Wiener under- standably retained a lifelong dislike of many of them especially Richard Courant. When I told Wiener at a Sunday lunch at his house that I was leaving MIT to join Courant’s group as my new husband was in the New York area, I was not aware of this bad situation and couldn’t understand why Wiener refused to carry on the conversation. Thus, to say the least, I had very little contact with Wiener. But as a fresh graduate student I had briefly tried out his course in Noise and Random Processes. It was clearly for those who knew more mathematics than I had learned in Toronto in applied mathematics and I dropped out. In spite of the Gottingen story Wiener admired Hilbert and continued to see him as, to quote his autobiog- raphy, “the sort of mathematician I would like to become, combining tremendous abstract power with a down-to-earth sense of physical reality.” To quote Mark Kac writing in 1964 on Wiener’s work: “The simplest and most celebrated example of a stochastic process is the Brownian motion of a particle. Wiener conceived in (1921) the idea of basing the theory of Brownian motion on a theory of measure in a set of all continuous paths. This idea proved enormously fruitful for probability theory. It breathed new life into old problems.” This work drew strongly on Taylor’s work that came from pictures of “plumes of smoke” and which had led Taylor to introduce his special correlations. As Norman Levinson put it there were two reasons for Wiener’s interest in Taylor’s work—one was that it inspired him to try turbulence as a model for his problem of integration in function spaces. And the other was that it suggested his own auto and cross correlation functions for his generalized harmonic analysis. I reread the introduction to Wiener’s “Cybernetics.” Looked at from a human point of view one perceives the incredibly high scientific aspirations of Wiener. Resting, I would like to say comfortably (but even I knew as a student his uneasiness), on a long history of successful accomplishment Wiener wanted to conquer the brain with mathematics. In the course of it he worked very hard with able physicians and experts in neurology to become not only as knowledgable as he could but able to interact. His great ambition was to put together the extant knowledge of computers, feedback systems and physiology coupled with the emerging subject of signal processing—all subjects he had contributed to funda- mentally. The course I went to in 1945 was a spinoff of these interests. In his introduction, read now 43 years later, he takes a rather high position for the role of his new subject. Still cybernetics has stood the test of time with engineers. His view of the relation of science and society is interesting if pes- simistic. 824 GIANTS [November “The best we can do is to see that a large public understands the trend and the bearing of the present work, and to confine our personal efforts to those fields, such as physiology and psychology, most remote from war and ex- ploitation. As we have seen, there are those who hope that the good of a better understanding of man and society which is offered by this new field of work may anticipate and outweigh the incidental contribution we are making to the concentration of power (which is always concentrated, by its very conditions of existence, in the hands of the most unscrupulous). I write in 1947, and I am compelled to say that it is a very slight hope.” There is no good source of biographical information for my next giant, John von Neumann. This situation is being repaired and we can look forward to a full biography in the next couple of years. v. Neumann was, like Wiener, a mathemat- ical prodigy as a child. His father, however, was an enlightened banker and somehow or other when v. Neumann was ready to go to university a compromise between banking (big business) and mathematics (purest of sciences) was worked out. v. Neumann went to Zurich to study chemistry (possibly applicable in the eyes of the family). I never met von Neumann. Occasionally I saw him in Richard Courant’s company. And that affected my life a lot because as I understand it, it was at y. Neumann’s recommendation that the first big university computer was placed with Courant’s group at N.Y.U. That was probably not disconnected from the fact that Courant and those around him shared v. Neumann’s view that mathematics would become an arid subject if it lost contact with science and engineering. Those who knew v. Neumann always remark on the speed of his brain. He grasped things immediately. His interests ranged over everything. I don’t know whether one should call his early work in quantum mechanics applied. One might say he set it up as a part of pure mathematics. His early elegant work in game theory received little attention until after the Second World War. But even before the Second World War broke out he became involved in ballistics in anticipation. von Neumann, as everyone knows played a big role in the development of the atomic bomb. And it was in that connection that he made his mark in fluid dynamics. Despite some striking contributions to the field (lots of us are hard at work these days on the paradoxes he uncovered in shock reflection) it led him quickly into big computation (big for its day) and hence into the whole area of large scale computing: The universal machine, the coding, the programming. Some ideas were around but he cleaned them up and set the whole thing on a logical and expandable footing. As Peter Lax has suggested he would have developed parallel computing if he had lived long enough. I have really no time to bring up his many contributions, to economics, to Monte Carlo methods etc. It might be said of v. Neumann that his sweep was so broad that it included most of applied mathematics. I would only like to reiterate his philosophy that mathematics would become an esoteric arid branch of science if it lost its connections. I think he would be happy to see today how modern mathematics is knitting bonds within its many branches and even more with other sciences. T turn now to my teacher Kurt Friedrichs, or as he was known to those around him, Frieder. Born in Kiel in 1901 he entered university in Dusseldorf. Following the German practice he studied a variety of topics in a variety of places (including the 1992] GIANTS 825 philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger). Finally, he came to “the Mecca of mathe- matics,” Gottingen in 1922. His relation to mathematics, pure and applied, is best described by his own expression that “he was like a dancing bear on a stove, first hopping on his pure foot till it got too hot and then on his applied foot.” In fact, if one looks over his work one finds a pretty random distribution. His first official applied mathematical work was as von Karman’s assistant in Aachen. He took the position according to his own explanation to Constance Reed because Courant thought that in the late twenties Friedrichs being so shy and withdrawn would have a hard time competing against pure mathematicians for an academic position in Germany. He became shortly the youngest professor at the University of Braunschweig. He left Germany to join Courant in America partly from disgust with the Nazis but also to be able to marry Nellie Bruell, forbidden under the Nazi racist rules. From then on he worked in elasticity, fluid dynamics, quantum field theory, plasma physics alternately with partial differential equations, asymptotics, spectral theory and other subjects too pure to be applied but too applied to be quite pure. Friedrichs liked to say that applied mathematics was whatever the physicist had discarded as no longer exciting. As a graduate student at New York University I first worked at editing the book on “Supersonic Flow and Shock Waves” by Courant and Friedrichs. That was my good luck. I learned the main ideas from Courant and the exceptions and the necessity to be accurate from Friedrichs. After passing my orals after my first child I went to Friedrichs for a thesis topic. I thought it would be in fluid dynamics but he showed me a whole bunch of topics mainly I think on spectral theory. He asked me if I could get excited about one; that was an essential part of my taking it on. I could not but we agreed I would work on one. But when my second child was on the way, the gods (Courant, Stoker and Friedrichs) decided my contract work could be developed quickly into a thesis. It was on stability of implosions (used as neither I nor Friedrichs knew for detonating the atomic bomb. It was connected to the collapse of supernovae under self-gravitation.) Beautiful special solutions can be found using the group invari- ance of the equations. Friedrichs was hopping on his pure foot and at times it was very hard to get him to think about fluids. Incidentally the idea of an implosion had been considered by v. Neumann, G. I. Taylor and by the German aeronautical scientist Guderley and for all I know the Russians. My stability result was very modest but it did give me a thesis and the asymptotic theory involved gave me a good start for other problems. I kept on learning from Friedrichs but I never did get involved in either quantum mechanics or spectral theory. Once Friedrichs got a physical problem properly and clearly mathematized (as say with either fluid dynamics or magneto-hydrodynamics), he then went after it with every tool he knew and wrestled it to the ground. When I was helping him with his Selecta just a few years before he died he kept saying “oh let’s not pick that one. So and so did it much more cleanly later.” He somehow had trouble realizing how important his innovations had been. One of the things that surprised me about Friedrichs was his indifference to the role of the big computer and even his own contributions to difference schemes as a useful tool for finding answers as opposed to existence theorems. I tried once to draw him out on that subject but got nowhere—which is the way it was when Friedrichs did not want to follow a particular line of thought. I wish now that I had asked him a lot more. 826 GIANTS [November My father is another example of the applied mathematician of this century. Born in 1897 and trained in Trinity College Dublin he came to Canada as a young man and started working in mechanics. He was diverted into differential geometry and the exciting new subject of relativity by the influence of Veblen. His lifelong interest was in the intersection of geometry and physics. He was fascinated like Taylor at the way nature worked and he fought hard for the turf of applied mathematics through the thirties. The war threw a lot of mathematicians into applied problems (in Canada that was 1939) and he fitted naturally. None of us should forget how frightened our world was at the thought that Hitler would win and his terrible ideas would prevail. Today some may look back and ask how we could have helped with weapons of destruction. But by and large there was very little pacifism and applied mathematicians for the most part were heavily engaged. It was in that period I first studied mathematics and its utility was of paramount interest. Only later did I capture the sense from my father of the beauty of nature transformed into mathematics and from Friedrichs the beauty of proof of the resulting mathematics. My father’s work has ranged from ideal steering mechanisms to general relativ- ity with the latter being his main stomping ground. A particular physics-geometry approach led him to invent the first finite element method accompanied by estimates. But the item I would like to tell you about is his excursion into dentistry and his feelings about it, since they have a universal application. In the thirties he was approached by a dentist, H. K. Box, about the problem of traumatic occlusion caused by biting. What’s that? In Figure 4, we have a rigid tooth lying in its rigid Figure 4. socket and separated from each other by the periodontal membrane which is transmitting the force of the bite and also the pain of traumatic occlusion if the membrane defects. Clearly a problem in elasticity and, mindful of George Bernard Shaw’s saying that even the Archbishop of Canterbury is 90% water, my father decided to tackle the problem with a model of a thin incompressible elastic membrane to represent the periodontal membrane. He worked hard and got some results but in 1972, 40 years later when he received the Boyle medal in Dublin he reflected: “T have a social conscience of sorts. When Dr. Box told me about traumatic occlusion, I lacked the strength of mind to tell him that I had other things to 1992] GIANTS 827 do. So I engaged on this work as a social duty. But as the mathematical argument took shape, my professionalism took over and I was fascinated by this problem in which the geometry of the tooth and the physics of the membrane were combined. The final result calls for a sardonic laugh. On the one hand, you have a paper of over forty pages, published nearly forty years ago, full of intricate formulae developed (if I may say so) with considerable skill. On the other hand, you have humanity suffering still, 1 presume, from traumatic occlusion.” So one must be wary of trying to do good in mathematics. Td like to close with a parting shot in the dark. Of all the sciences mathematics has had the least impact on biology. v. Neumann died before the spectacular developments of molecular biology had started and that is really even true of Wiener. Both were challenged by problems of biology but as it turned out somewhat peripheral problems. Can we look forward in the next decade to new giants: to a new G. I. Taylor or a new von Karman thoroughly immersed in biology as they were in mechanics who will bring to the v. Neumann or Wiener of the day the deep and as yet not formulated mathematical problems of biology? I think that’s an extremely interesting future to look forward to. Thank you. Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences 251 Mercer Street New York, NY 10012 One of the facts which the historian of the future will not fail to note regarding our present epoch is the way in which mathematicians have turned from applied mathematics. Mathe- maticians may be divided into three classes in respect to their attitude towards applied mathematics: (a) those who have nothing to do with applied mathematics and do not want to, regarding it as an inferior type of intellectual exercise; (b) those who would like to be better acquainted with applied mathemat- ics, but cannot find time for prolonged study of what is not their major interest; (c) those primarily interested in applied mathe- matics, studying the pure almost solely for its repercussions on the applied... The eighteenth century was the age of class (c); the twentieth century is the age of class (a). The nineteenth was the age of transition. —John L. Synge Monthly, 1939, p. 155 828 GIANTS [November Euclidean Quadratic Fields R. B. Eggleton C. B. Lacampagne J. L. Selfridge 1, INTRODUCTION. An algebraic number a@ of degree n is any root of an irreducible polynomial of degree n with coefficients in the rationals Q. The algebraic field Q(a) is the smallest subfield of the complex numbers which contains a. The algebraic integers [(a@) are those elements of Q(a) which are roots of monic polynomials with (ordinary) integer coefficients. Computation in /(q) is in general unlike computation in the integers Z, since usually there is no analogue of the uniqueness of prime factorization. Historically the (false) assumption that prime factorization is unique in every algebraic field proved to be a stumbling block for various distinguished mathematicians, among them Gabriel Lamé. (A nice discussion is given by Edwards [6, Chap. 4].) The problem of determining the algebraic fields which do have unique fac- torization is still not completely solved. However, in certain fields, known as Euclidean fields, it is possible to define an analogue of Euclid’s algorithm, and in such cases this guarantees unique factorization. The algebraic fields of degree 2 which have this property are called Euclidean quadratic fields. Work of Davenport and others, culminating in 1952, showed that there are just 21 of them. The well-known book by Hardy and Wright [8] is a standard reference on Euclidean quadratic fields. In 14 of the 21 cases they present proofs that Q(Vd ) is Euclidean. The reader naturally wonders whether the proofs in the 7 remaining Euclidean cases are difficult. Hardy and Wright also prove that there are no other Euclidean cases with d < 0 and only finitely many for d # 1 mod 4. In this paper, we use a uniform geometric method both to prove that Q(Vd ) is Euclidean in all 21 cases, and to show that it is not Euclidean in any other case with d <0 or d#1 mod4. The constructions are straightforward and give geometric insight into the arithmetic of the relevant quadratic fields. We hope that the reader shares in the pleasure which they have given us. We wish to thank Peter Waterman for help with the figures drawn using Mathematica graphics. In the next section we prove some basic properties of /(Vd ). Readers familiar with algebraic integers and norms should skip to the following section, which describes a representation of Q(V/d ) in the Euclidean plane. 2. INTEGERS AND NORMS IN QUADRATIC FIELDS. If Q(a) is a quadratic field, then a :=(r + sVd )/t for some integers r, s, t and d, with d # 0,1 and squarefree, s # 0 and t > 0. Indeed, Q(a) = Q(Vd ) in this case. We call this the quadratic field with discriminant d. If the discriminant is negative, the field is complex, and otherwise real. It is convenient to refer to it as OWa ), and to refer to its set of algebraic integers as I(Vd ). 1992] EUCLIDEAN QUADRATIC FIELDS 829 Every B © Q(Vd ) has the form B = (a+ bVd )/c, where a, b and c are integers, c >0 and gcd(a,b,c) = 1. When B €I(yd ) it satisfies a monic quadratic equation with integer coefficients, say 8B? — mB +n = 0. There are two cases. (1) If b = 0 then a? — mac + nc? = 0, so cla”. But_gcd(a,c) = 1 and c > 0, so c=1 and B =a. Conversely, any a € Z is in I(Vd). (2) If b #0, the monic quadratic equation with rational coefficients which is satisfied by 6 is easily seen to be unique. Also, we note that [cB - (a + bvd)]|[cB - (a - bVd)] = (cB - a)’ - b*d = 0, so PB? — (2a/c)B + (a? — b?d)/c? = 0, whence m=2a/c and n= (a? - b?d)/c?. Thus c|2a and c?|(a? — b?d). Let g := gced(a,c). Then gla, gle and g°|(a? — b7d), so g?|b7d. But d is squarefree, so g|b. Therefore g|gcd(a, b, c), so g = 1. Now g = 1 and c|2a implies c|2 so c = 1 or 2. (i) If c = 1 then m = 2a, n= a*—b'd and B =a + byd . Conversely, taking m = 2a and n =a? — b’d shows that any such 8 is in I(/d_). (ii) If c = 2 then a is odd and 4|(a? — bd), so b?d = a* = 1 mod 4. Then b is odd, so d = 1 mod 4. Conversely, with a and b odd and 1 mod 4, taking m =a and n = (a? — b7d)/4 shows that B =(a+ byd )/2 is in I(/d ). In view of these results, whenever d = 1 mod4 it is convenient to write all the irrational algebraic integers in the form (a + b¥d )/2 by taking a and b to be any integers with the same parity. Thus we can summarize the situation as follows: The set of algebraic integers of Q(Vd ) is {a + byd:.a,b € Z}, if d # 1mod4, {(a + bVd)/2: a,b € Z,a =b mod2}, ifd = 1mod4. 1d) = Note that if d # 1 mod 4 then d = 2 or 3 mod 4 because d is squarefree. We note here that every element of Q(Vd ) is an algebraic integer divided by a positive integer. For any B = (a+ bvd )/c € Q(Vd ) where a, b and c are integers with c > 0, we define the norm to be N(B) = la? — bd /c?. (Some authors omit the absolute value operation from this definition.) The identity (a — bd)(e? — f2d) = (ae + bdf)” — (be + af)'d ensures that norm is multiplicative; that is, if 6 and y are any two elements of Q(d ) then N(By) = N(B)N(y)- (When d = —1, this corresponds to Euler’s identity showing that the product of two integers, each the sum of two squares, is itself the sum of two squares.) In particular, if 8 € (Vd ) satisfies the unique quadratic equation B* — mB + n=O, where m and n are integers, then N(8) = |n|. Thus, the norm of any algebraic integer in (Vd ) is a nonnegative integer. However, an element of Q(Vd ) with norm equal to a nonnegative integer is not necessarily an algebraic integer: (3 + 4i)/5 is an example in Q(i). A unit of I(/d ) is any element with norm 1. Any two elements B, y € I(Vd ) are associates if there exists a unit ¢ such that B = ye : in that case N(B) = N(y). Conversely, if N(B) = N(y) then N(B/y) = 1, so B/y is a unit if it is in 1(Vd ), 830 EUCLIDEAN QUADRATIC FIELDS [November and then f and y are associates. If B, y © I(Vd ) are such that y/B € (Vd ), then B is a factor of y : we write this as Bly. In particular, if B and y are associates then B|y and y|p. A prime of I(Vd ) is any 7 € I(Vd_), with Nr) > 1, such that if + = By with B, y = (Vd ) then necessarily one of 8 and y is a unit, and so the other is an associate of 7. Let us call the prime 7 strong if it has the property that 7|By implies 7|B or ly when B, y € I(Vd_). (Edwards [6] uses the term irreducible where we follow Hardy and Wright [8] in using the term prime; Edwards reserves the term prime where we propose to use the term strong prime.) For fields where unique factorization holds, it turns out that every prime is a strong prime. We will later give some examples of primes which are not strong. 3. REPRESENTING Q(/d ) IN THE EUCLIDEAN PLANE. A simple geometric representation of QWd ) in the Euclidean plane is given by the mapping (a + bVd)/e > (a/e,b/c), under which Q(Vd ) is represented by Q?, the rational points in the plane. We call this the plane embedding of Q(/d ). In order to preserve more algebraic properties of Q(Vvd ), Lenstra [11] uses a more complicated embedding for algebraic fields, but the simple embedding we have just defined suffices for this paper. Under the plane embedding of Q(Vd ), the algebraic integers in I(Vd ) corre- spond to the lattice points Z? when d #1 mod4. When d=1 mod4 they correspond to the lattice points Z? and the midlattice points Z? + (1/2, 1/2) = {(a + 1/2,b + 1/2): a,b € Z}. For any A € I(Vd ), we define the unit neighborhood of A in Q(Vd ) to be the set U(A) = {8 € O(vd): N(B- A) < 1}. Suppose A € I(Vd ) maps into (x, y) under the plane embedding of Q(Vd ): we use U(x, y) to denote the image of U(A) under the plane embedding, and refer to U(x, y) as a unit neighborhood in the plane. Then U(x, y) = {(r, 8) € Q?: (r= x)? = (s —y)’dl <1} so U(x, y) consists of the rational points in the interior of a region of the Euclidean plane bounded by an ellipse when d < 0 (in fact a circle when d = —1) or bounded by a pair of conjugate hyperbolas when d > 0. The boundary has eccentricity ¥1 + 1/d , and center (x, y) which is a lattice point or a midlattice point, the latter possibility arising only when d = 1 mod 4. 4, EUCLIDEAN QUADRATIC FIELDS. The quadratic field Q(Vd ) is Euclidean if, corresponding to any given y, 5 € I(Vd ), with 5 # 0, there are A,p €I(Vd ) such that y=Adtp and N(p) 3 since r? + s7|d| > 1. Hence the only complex Euclidean quadratic fields with discriminant d # 1 mod 4 are those with d = —1 and —2. Case 2: d < 0, d = 1 mod4. When |d| < 12, the unit neighborhood U(0,0) contains all of F(d), since every (r,s) € F(d) satisfies r? + s?|d| < 1/4 + |d|/16 <1. 832 EUCLIDEAN QUADRATIC FIELDS [November Now consider a pair of congruent ellipses, centered at (0,0) and (1/2, 1/2), each with horizontal semimajor axis 1 and eccentricity e. A straightforward calculation shows that F(d) lies in the union of their interiors just if e? < 4y3, —6, while for all greater values of e the point P=(1/2,V3 — 3/2) lies outside both ellipses. The point (1/2, 7/30) € F(d) is sufficiently close to P that it lies outside every unit neighborhood U(x, y) when |d| > 15, for then (1/2 — x)? + (7/30 — y)*|d| > 16/15 > 1 for each ellipse. Therefore, the only complex Euclidean fields with discriminant d = 1 mod 4 are those with d = —3, —7 and -i1. - When d = —15, Figure 2 shows these ellipses in boldface and parts of other unit neighborhoods in lightface. The enlargement shows the region where 0.25 < x < 0.55 and 0.15 5 is squarefree. Thus U(—1,0) covers the rest of F(d) when d = 6, 7, 21 and 29. So these four fields are Euclidean, and henceforth we restrict our attention to the portion of F(d) lying above U(—1,0). We now come to the cases not proved in Hardy and Wright [8]. Case 3: 33

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