First of all, I was delighted to see the name of my distinguished colleague Condorcet hitting the headlines yet again [1]. Of course, the voting system carrying his name is really mine. In fact when, some hundreds of years after me, my system was named after him, this only anticipated that yet another few hundreds of years later, Stigler [2] came up with Stigler's Law of Eponomy. This states, as you know as well as I do, that a decent manner in which to properly indicate that a scientific result is not yours is to have it named after you. The only catch is that the world is not told it's mine. That's why I am so grateful to Iain McLean and John London [3], and others as detailed in [4], who recently took pains to put the facts on record. While initially missing out on my very first paper on the subject [5], they nevertheless recognized my achievements just on the grounds of the two later papers [6, 7]. That first paper got buried away in the catacombs of the Vatican Library and was excavated only in October 2000 [4]. Which, incidentally, teaches the practical lesson that even when your paper remains unread for over seven hundred years, it's still not too late for it to resurface at the turn of the next millenium and drive home its point. Your readers may find this comforting.
Speaking of practicality, I notice that I should come to why I am
writing this letter. It's because I was intrigued by the eminently
practical solution that Crespo Cuaresma has for his friends Alan and
Charles. As the two fellows don't know what to do with their money, they
distribute not it, but infinitely divisible points. I particularly
appreciate the ingenious mathematization of those mundane monetary mishaps
because, as a philosopher, I am thrilled by the philosophical implications.
When I was active we worried much about contemplating an infinitely
expansible universe, but an infinitely divisible point was unthinkable. A
point was a point. An indivisible unity. Or, as I said in [5], unus
punctus. I apologize for changing the dialect, it's just that I don't
know what you folks would say these days, a pixel?, which makes me
chuckle since, once you are on file with as many publications as I am,
close to three hundred, you can be used as the intellectual originator of
almost anything. Some people have even turned me into one of the fathers
of Computer Science [8], though simultaneously picturing me as one
of the most inspired madmen who ever lived
does not do me
justice. All through my life one of my concerns was communication, and if
communication is promoted not only by my combinatorial aids but also by
Computer Science, then I would hail it loudly and instantly work it into my
general art. As a first attempt I have had my three electoral papers
rapidly prototyped at
www.uni-augsburg.de/llull/, to assist your
contemporaries in the correct attribution of my ideas.