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Scott Cram Inner circle 2678 Posts |
Many times in magic, there are independent inventions. Then, there's people who accidentally re-invent classic ideas simply because they didn't do the proper research. My favorite example of this latter category was the guy who saw David Copperfield perform "Top 10" (the McCombical Deck done with record album covers), and marketed a version of the same trick with playing cards, unaware he was duplicating a classic.
I guess this happens on other fields, as well. Take the following example: http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract Dr. Mary Tai has apparently worked out an amazing new method for working out the area underneath a curve. It gets worse...the paper describing this method has been cited over 200 times! Any college calculus student will instantly recognize this method as a type of integration, the standard approach for measuring the area under a curve. It's actually kind of cool if Dr. Tai truly worked this out on her own, but it's still an astounding thing to not realize that a concept as important as integral calculus exists. To put this in a magic perspective, this is worse than the reinvention of the McCombical Deck - it's on the scale of believing you're the first person to develop a method for sawing a person in half! Dover Books' "Look Geometry" is cited as inspiration, although the method from there isn't applicable "due to the uneven time periods". I do like the rigorous proof: "The validity of each model was verified through comparison of the total area obtained from the above formulas to a standard (true value), which is obtained by plotting the curve on graph paper and counting the number of small units under the curve." |
balducci Loyal user Canada 227 Posts |
This is what I had typed in and ready to post:
--- I doubt she was unfamiliar with calculus, or that she was trying to lay claim to discovering it. The intent of her paper appears to have been to make widely known a better method to evaluate areas under a certain curve than the three (Alder's, Vecchio's, and Wolever's) that were in use in her field's literature when her paper was published. --- After typing that, I went back to the site and did a search on the author's name in the journal. If you do that you will come up with (at least) two rebuttals of Tai's article and model by other readers, and a two part (two pages but split over two separate pdfs I mean) response by Tai to them. Worth looking at if you want to see the full story.
Make America Great Again! - Trump in 2020 ... "We're a capitalistic society. I go into business, I don't make it, I go bankrupt. They're not going to bail me out. I've been on welfare and food stamps. Did anyone help me? No." - Craig T. Nelson, actor.
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balducci Loyal user Canada 227 Posts |
Here is a link to a single file containing the responses mentioned above.
http://jt512.dyndns.org/documents/tai_comments_50.pdf
Make America Great Again! - Trump in 2020 ... "We're a capitalistic society. I go into business, I don't make it, I go bankrupt. They're not going to bail me out. I've been on welfare and food stamps. Did anyone help me? No." - Craig T. Nelson, actor.
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The Magic Cafe Forum Index » » Not very magical, still... » » Congratulations, Dr., you've just invented integral calculus! (0 Likes) |
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