![\"Portrait](\"http:\/\/oddthinking.somethinkodd.com\/images\/CamilleJordan.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
To understand the genius of this well-regarded French mathematician, we need to do a little experiment together.<\/p>\n
Posit a simple closed curve, C<\/i>, in the plane R<\/b>2<\/sup>… oh err… sorry. Please permit me to start again.<\/p>\n Take out a pencil and a sheet of paper. Start drawing a swirly line, around the page and, without lifting the pencil and without letting the line cross, make sure you finish up at the same point you started, to form a curvy loop. With me so far? What you just drew is called a Jordan Curve<\/em> after our hero Monsieur Jordan.<\/p>\n The next step is to take out a felt-tipped pen and colour in the inside of the loop. Still with me?<\/p>\n If you are, you clearly do not have the genius of Jordan, because he was the first person to say “Whoa! Wait a moment! You can’t just assume<\/em> that such a loop has an inside and an outside! That’s something you need to prove<\/em> first!” (Of course, he probably said it in French, which probably made it sound more geniusy.)<\/p>\n Legend has it, he then spent much of the rest of his life trying to prove that you could colour the inside of a Jordan Curve. He thought he had succeeded at one stage, but his proof turned out to be incorrect. It wasn’t until after Jordan’s death that Oswald Veblen<\/a> managed to finally prove the Jordan curve theorem<\/a>, and colourers-in around the world could finally nod in relief, and break out the Derwents<\/a>.<\/p>\n So, if what you are working on seems rather pointless, remember Jordan. Remember his esoteric, pointless and ultimately futile goal in life made him famous enough to have a curve, an asteroid<\/a> and an institute<\/a> named after him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To understand the genius of Camille Jordan, we need to do a little experiment together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23,31,35,41],"tags":[70],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-based-on-a-true-story","category-geek","category-heroic-failures","category-story-telling","tag-mathematics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}