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Page 250 The little booklet in actuality offered little fresh insight into the problems of higher algebra; only a handful of copies ever came off the press, and Orson himself was later dissatisfied with his "discovery." Essentially, he had proposed an equation that differed only slightly from recognized procedures, although one mathematician later agreed that his ideas had merit: "I have no recollection of ever having seen a general equation representing the differences of the roots of Algebraic Equations, and have no doubt your discovery... is new. And you seem to have applied it very profitably in the solution of equations." 29 For years, Orson had corresponded with the Analyst, an Iowa-based journal for scholars both serious and amateur interested in the solutions of technical problems. In its pages, readers were invited to submit their own original math problems - for Orson, working through the periodical was a kind of hobby, like figuring acrostics, and in the 1870s, he contributed a number of equations of his own design. But he was not a simple dabbler. For many years he labored over a calculus text, never published, designed for use in the fledgling University of Deseret; over two hundred pages of re-castings and derivations from the well-known principles of elementary calculus issued from his pen, and when the work was completed, he contemplated a sequel. Mathematicians who have examined Orson's original proofs in manuscript pronounce him to have possessed "an impressive breadth of mathematical knowledge." Legends have arisen that Orson's New and Easy Method was once hailed by scholars world-wide for its revolutionary contributions, but no evidence exists that this was so, nor do modern historians of science see any justification for such an attitude. His theorems, basically derivative in character, show only that he was indeed conversant with the state of higher mathematics in both the United States and Europe. |
