Eric Flint: Grantville Gazette.Volume VII

Dury understood immediately. "Mysterious are the ways of God, Colette. Mysterious, indeed."

Before he left, Colette Modi made him promise one thing. "Initially I want no one to know that I wrote these, John. So please promise me that only the name Crucibellus will be connected with these manuscripts. The address I have left in the manuscript is Inn of The Maddened Queen. That way many will assume it is simply a postal drop."

Dury smiled. "I promise."

Two months later John Dury was in London. It was there that he mailed a copy of Colette's manuscript to Marin Mersenne in Paris and Nicolas Peiresc in Aix-en-Provence. The third he took to Samuel Hartlib.

To say that the Crucibellus Manuscripts took the European mathematical community by storm would be a vast understatement. In early 1632 many Europeans were still unaware that something unusual had happened to their universe. Even those who had heard the tales of a community of Englishmen in Thuringia tended to discredit the idea unless they had actually traveled to Grantville themselves. But when the Crucibellus Manuscripts began circulating in 1632, people's minds began to change. It was not that all of the concepts were totally new and different. But it was the style and the breadth and the mystery which set intellectual circles abuzz. For Crucibellus had outlined the topics of future manuscripts and promised that each would appear at approximately three month intervals. Mathematical Symbology of the Future. Analytical Geometry. Differential Calculus. Integral Calculus. Differential Equations. Matrix Algebra. Probability. Statistics. Fractals. Special and General Relativity. Quantum Mechanics.

The style was often brutally terse. While only the most essential concepts were given, the example problems in the manuscripts were explained in clear and exquisite detail and were often taken from problems the reader could imagine from everyday life.

And then there were the challenge problems. Theorems unheard of. Problems never dreamt of. Problems no mathematician in the seventeenth century could solve, especially in the ninety days before the answer would appear in the next manuscript. The first challenge problem set the stage for the rest: Prove the existence of the Euler Line. That is, that the orthocenter, centroid, and circumcenter of any triangle must lie in a straight line, with the centroid exactly twice as far from the orthocenter as from the circumcenter.

Soon, of course, a number of mathematicians had discovered the real name of the author and were studying in Grantville themselves.

But without the Crucibellus Manuscripts it might have taken years to stir their curiosity.

Ask a mathematician three hundred years later who Mike Stearns was and many would give you a blank look. But ask them about the Crucibellus Manuscripts and watch their eyes light up with recognition or listen to them discourse for hours on their impact.

The Crucibellus Manuscripts.

Long will they echo across the corridors of time.