Gordon and Dawn Fisher
gmfisher7@optonline.net
About Time
Kinds of Time
About "times" of Aristotle, Galileo, Newton and Einstein.Time as Motion and Motion as Time
A definition of 'time' justifying the statements "time is the number of motion" and "motion is the number of time', as Aristotle indicated.Time as Motion, in the Spirit of Aristotle
A rewrite of above, with a different emphasis.Clock Motion and Time Dilation
A piece about different uses of the term 'time'..On Time(s) and Off Time(s)
Heidegger versus Carnap about time(s)..
Poems
The Skeleton of Water
Some poems of mine.New Poems
2007, 2011
History of Mathematics
On the Group of All Homeomorphisms of a Manifold
My doctoral dissertation as published in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, November 1960Cauchy and the Infinitely Small
Published in Historia Mathematica, August 1978Cauchy's Variables and Orders of the Infinitely Small
Published in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science,, September 1979The Infinite and Infinitesimal Quantities of Du Bois-Reymond and their Reception
Published in Archive for History of Exact Sciences, June 1981Euclid and the Egyptian Rope Stretchers
About the extent to which Euclid’s Elements may have been based on his desire to put into words directions for practical measurements of the kinds carried out in ancient Egypt by people known as rope-stretchers.Celestial Essays (pdf)
Astronomia and Astrologia
Babylonia and Egypt
Corresponding to Stars
Divinations
Epicureans and American Indians
Gnostics
Mathematics, Time and the Heavens
Stoics
Adumbrations of Radiations
About some astronomical/astrological matters involving the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton.
About Languages
Seeing and Saying
About the place of diagrams and pictures in the foundations of mathematics.Right as Rain
A talk about language and mathematics given in 1987 at James Madison University on being appointed Madison Scholar.Personal Languages and Meaning as Pointing
About the use in language studies of a kind of English idiolects I call "personal languages"
Essays written for online courses
A Sorites Paradox
A logical analysis of a "proof" that all elephants are small.
(for a course on philosophy of language).About Israeli Nationalism
Discussion of the role of religion in the development of Israeli nationalism
(for a course on Jewish-Christian relations).Grete's Mother
On the uniqueness of the Holocaust.
(for the same course).
Autobiographical Note
Born 5 Oct 1925 in St. Paul, MN. Moved to Little Falls, MN in 1930, and to Miami, FL in 1940. Served in the U. S. Navy Hospital Corps 1943-1945, mostly at Fleet Hospital 115 on Guam. Served in U. S. Army Signal Corps 1947-1949, mostly in Alaska and Adak (Aleutian Islands). B.A. in mathematics and philosophy, University of Miami (FL), 1951. Ph.D. in mathematics, Louisiana State University, 1959. Instructor in mathematics at Princeton University, NJ, 1959-1963. Junior Fellow in the Humanities at Princeton, 1962-1963, for study in History of Science. Senior Lecturer in Mathematics and in History and Philosophy of Science at University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand and then at University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand, 1963-1967. Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA 1967-1991.
Met my wife-to-be Helene Dawn Smith in 1951. We were mathematics graduate students together at the University of Miami, and later at Tulane University We were married in 1956, when she started using the name Dawn Smith Fisher. We have two daughters, Andrea born in 1957 and Jennifer born in 1960. My wife got an M.S. in mathematics from Tulane University in 1956, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Virginia in 1986 (sic!). We sometimes taught at different and sometimes at the same universities. We taught together at James Madison University two different times, and both retired from there.
We moved to South Salem, NY in 2005 to be near our daughter Jennifer, her husband David, and our grandson Daniel. Our daughter Andrea now lives in Charlottesville, VA, with our other grandson Liam. Added 2 Mar 2013: As of 1 Mar 2013, we are living with our daughter et al. Added 10 Apr 2013: As of 31 Mar 2013, we have been living at Ridgefield Crossings, an assisted living facility in Ridgefield, CT.