Ken Ward's Math Pages

I read "... to our wives ..." on the first page of "Sequences" by H. Halberstam and K.F. Roth. { Aik. } Ok, printed in 1966. Only fourteen years after Alan Turing was convicted for having a homosexual relationship with a young Manchester man. So maybe "... to our wives ..." means "we are not homosexuals"? Perhaps, not likely. Still, I think it is rather odd to start a mathematics book with "... to our wives ...". Unless it were the wives who were doing the actual mathematics, of course. In that time women were badly discriminated in the academic world. Serious, why write "... to our wives ..." in a mathematics book? Love? Not a very romantic place to put it. A math book! Come on. I think they wrote it out of relief. "... despite your continuous attacks on our concentration by your endless babble talk, loud hoovering and yelling on the phone ..." we managed to finish our book. Something like that.

I added Ken Ward's Math Pages to the Cool Sites box. Although not even close to Eric Weisstein's huge encyclopedic MathWorld I like "Ken's pages" because it has unique content, is the only place on internet where I found a detailed proof of the Vandermonde Convolution theorem, and because I want to create something similar. Different topics of course but of the same ( achievable ) size and quality. Some day this mathematics diary should evolve into a mathematics site with worthwile content.