[seqfan] Re: Who named Catalan numbers?

[Alex M]

As someone outside the professional mathematics world, I thought the rule
was that you couldn't name anything after *yourself*, but if someone later
referred to your wake by naming it after you, you could end up with
something named after you -- it just requires someone else to name it after
you for you.

~6 out of 5 statisticians say that the
number of statistics that either make
no sense or use ridiculous timescales
at all has dropped over 164% in the
last 5.62474396842 years.


On Tue, Feb 11, 2014 at 7:34 AM, Peter Luschny <peter.luschny at gmail.com>wrote:

> NJAS> But it avoids a lot of debate!
> What would be academia without debate? ;-)
>
> As far as it is about names: 'Catalan numbers' is a wonderful name,
> a brand burned by Riordan (as implicitly at least was confirmed above
> by Gould). Especially for me since Catalán is also a dialect of the
> Latin language (not of Spanish!) which I like very much and which I
> always associate with the 'Catalan numbers' which were named after a
> French speaking Belgian mathematician.
>
> As far as it is about history: A week ago I would have answered as
> Gould said he sometimes did: 'Euler-Fuss-Segner-Catalan'. But now I
> feel that I have overlooked the importance of the Lamé contribution.
> Looking into Gould's definitive bibliography of Catalan numbers [1]
> we see eight papers of Catalan but only one from Lamé. But in this
> paper Euler's conjecture is proved (in 1838). After that the fruits
> were hanging low and Catalan immediately (in the same year) began to
> pick them. Catalan begins his first paper: "M. Lamé a démontré que
> l'equation
> ... je vais chercher à en déduire quelques conséquences."
>
> Peter
>
> [1] http://www.math.wvu.edu/~gould/BibGood%20final.pdf
> For readers fluent in German this is a nice introduction
> to the Catalan numbers:
> [2] http://www.bnv-bamberg.de/home/ba2636/catalanz.pdf
>
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