To: smolejv@gmx.net who wrote (31441 ) 4/13/2003 4:19:05 PM From: jim black Respond to Okay Dolinar. First they are called continued fractions. Venturing inot tha field requires considerable understanding of comlex variable analysis. I was interested in mathematics since high school and reading a biography of Einstein. I was also intensely (still am) obsessed with astronomy. The math dept of U of T was an amazing experience. I also had an intense interest in how the brain works. Stumbled as pre-med into Dr Wall's first year calculus as a freshman and made it my major, others being physics and German, and was dumbfounded at how beautiful the subject matter and the dept's approach to the subject was. So I kept going and I kept the pre-med work. Kept putting off entrance into med school. I would probably still be in school if they did not terminate with degrees. I still get that tingle come a September (what will we discover this year?). It did not take me long as for most to understand that though I have rather somewhat superior aptitude for the subject and it still provides pleasure reading for me I realized I was NOT a Gauss, an Euler, a Ramanujan, a Bernoulli, a Riemann, a Weirerstrass, a Goedel...or even a Moore, so I decided I was not going to live my life as a second tier mathematician. Truly good(creative) mathematicians come once a generation or so. So I went to med school, did 3 years of general practice to pay debts, back into residency at Univ of Wisconsin and 20 years in Seattle area where I learned (Heinlein's invented word grokked is a better word) only when Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter how much I missed the stars. I have a ranch in high desert and a Fujinon 150 mm per tube comet chaser binocular telescope. But family pressures, an 87 year old mom, and lots of old friends have drawn me back to the one acceptable place in western Washington, in the rainshadow of the Olympic mountains that we stick and rudder pilots call the "blue hole", clear when everyone else has cloudy skies and rain. It is an anomaly. I seem to be drawm to anomalies, rather similar to singularities in basic complex analysis. Not really as interesting a journey as it sounds. I tend to do things rather to extremes. Four years ago I never had a horse. Now I have 5 1/2 Friesians, (foal due in July).
