Looking to Euler

I haven’t forgotten about writing original material here — actually I’ve been trying to think of why something I’ve not thought about a long while is true, which is embarrassing and hard to do — but in the meanwhile I’d like to remember Leonhard Euler’s 306th birthday and point to Richard Elwes’s essay here about Euler’s totient function. “Totient” is, as best I can determine, a word that exists only for this mathematical concept — it’s the count of how many numbers are relatively prime to a given number — but even if the word comes only from the mildly esoteric world of prime number studies, it’s still one of my favorite mathematical terms. It feels like a word that ought to be more successful. Someday I’ll probably get in a nasty argument with other people playing Boggle about it.

Apparently, though, Euler didn’t dub this quantity the “totient”, and the word is a neologism coined by James Joseph Sylvester (1814 – 1897). That’s pretty respectable company, though: Sylvester — whose name you probably brush up against if you study mathematical matrices — is widely praised for his skill in naming things, although the only terms I know offhand that he gave us were “totient” and “discriminant”. That term in the quadratic formula which tells you whether a quadratic equation has two real, one real, or two imaginary solutions, was a name (not a concept) given by him, and he named (and extended) the similar concept for cubic equations. I do believe there are more such Sylvester-dubbed terms, just, that we need a Wikipedia category to gather them together.

I’m amused to be reminded that, according to the St Andrews biographies of mathematicians, Sylvester at least one tossed off this version of the Chicken McNuggets problem, possibly after he’d worked out the general solution:

I have a large number of stamps to the value of 5d and 17d only. What is the largest denomination which I cannot make up with a combination of these two different values.

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