Janice, my sister, had been pestering her husband, a carpenter, for more than a decade to build a screen door for the kitchen.
One day, to her delight, he built and installed one in less than two hours. It was both practical and pretty. She glanced towards the front door and wistfully remarked that one would look good there, as well.
"Are you kidding?" he gasped. "You can't just whip these things up, you know. It takes ten years to build a door like this."
Jesse DouglasBorn 3 Jul 1897; died 7 Oct 1965 at age 68.American mathematician who was awarded one of the first two Fields Medals in 1936 for solving the Plateau problem. which had first been posed by the Italian-French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange in 1760. The Plateau problem is one of finding the surface with minimal area determined by a fixed boundary. Experiments (1849) by the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau demonstrated that the minimal surface can be obtained by immersing a wire frame, representing the boundaries, into soapy water. Douglas developed what is now called the Douglas functional, so that by minimizing this functional he could prove the existence of the solution to the Plateau problem. Douglas later developed an interest in group theory. |
