Abstract
With the advent of personal computers, mathematicians and PC team up with each other in the scientific sphere, wherein one sheds light on the significance of the other. However, hitherto PC rarely appears in publications to meet with a fair share of identification, and even its unique contribution has only been flirted with. For this underrepresented minority case in academia, Shalosh B. Ekhad is duly credited with his remarks “the computer helps so much and so often” in sociocultural paradigms. With the pull of academic accession, this article examines the perduring dark story of the Zeilberger–Ekhad theorem with extensive visualizations. This scientometrical case study is expected to provide a unique opportunity to re-scrutinize the whole story, discourage bias in later accounts that may appear, and uncover some unfolded motivations in human–machine cooperation scenarios.
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Notes
The 3B1, also known as the PC7300, or Unix PC, was a UNIX workstation computer originally developed by Convergent Technologies (later acquired by Unisys), and marketed by AT&T in the mid- to late-1980 s. As an erstwhile-innovative PC7300 variants, it was a 10 MHz Motorola MC68010-based Unix machine with a full-height 67 MB disk and expanded onboard memory to 1 or 2 MB.
“The original Shalosh B. Ekhad was actually a Hebrew translation of the first PC that I owned, called AT&T 3B1. At the time it was a very innovative machine, the first UNIX PC, that was manufactured by AT&T in the 80s. The Hebrew translation of 3B1 is Shalosh B. Ekhad,” Doron Zeilberger said. https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/pubs/mayjune07web.pdf. (p. 15).
(Guest-) Opinion 105: Interview with Shalosh B. Ekhad about Mikhail Gelfand's Interview with Yuri Manin. http://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion105.html.
Ekhad's 2050 Plane Geometry: An Elementary Textbook, http://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/GT.html; Ekhad's Computer-Generated Alphametics,http://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/hans/hans.html; Ekhad's One Hundred and Twenty Connect-Four End-Game Problems,http://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/C4/C4.html; Ekhad's One Hundred and Twenty Pic-a-Pix Problems,http://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/PicAPix/Pic.html; Ekhad's Spelling Puzzles,http://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/SB; Ekhad's Sixty Six Skyscrapers Puzzles, http://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/SK/SK.html.
Home Page of Doron Zeilberger's servant. http://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/ekhad/ekhad.html.
The Personal Journal of Shalosh B. Ekhad and Doron Zeilberger (http://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/pj.html) is an open-access journal, which only published Professor Doron Zeilberger and his co-author Shalosh B. Ekhad’s articles ongoing updated online. All those papers (and lectures) are exclusively published in this Personal Journal, and sometimes many are also in arxiv.org, but not in any refereed regular journal, unless noted otherwise.
Shalosh B. Ekhad and Tewodros Amdeberhan. Indeed Shaloshable! https://www.math.temple.edu/~tewodros/SHALO.PDF; Doron Zeilberger. WZ Theory, Chapter II. https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/9811070.pdf.
In 1975, the Harry-Dym equation, also known as the Harry-Dym hierarchies, first appeared in the paper written by the deceased American mathematician and physicist Martin David Kruskal. Professor Kruskal reported the Harry Dym’s unpublished original work and reaffirmed this prevailing equation. Interestingly, Professor Kruskal retired from Princeton University in 1989 and joined the mathematics department of Rutgers University, holding the David Hilbert Chair of Mathematics.
Announcements. Bulletin of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications, Vol. 44, May 2005, p. 12.
According to the Who's Bigger Rankings, Donald E. Knuth is the 1746th position on the most famous person list who has ever lived, and the 5917rd position on the most significant person list.
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Acknowledgements
Judging whether personal computer was duly credited in publications is well beyond the scope of this article. The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest regarding the publication of this paper. The authors hereby desire to express our indebtedness to anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. We show our great appreciation to the photograph courtesy of Doron Zeilberger. The authors especially want to express great thanks to Professor Xun Wang for his valuable advice and insightful comments. This work was supported in part by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant 2018YFC1604002 and in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants U1705261, U1536207, U1536201 and U1636113.
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Hu, Z., Cui, Y., Zhang, J. et al. Shalosh B. Ekhad: a computer credit for mathematicians. Scientometrics 122, 71–97 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03305-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03305-7