Introduction

Abstract

The greatest mathematician of the 18th century, Joseph Louis Lagrange, set the highest―perhaps improbable―standard of teaching when he declared that one would not have truly understood his own work until he has made it so clear that he can go out and explain it effectively to the first man he meets on the street. This is of course an extremely high bar to hurdle for scholars then and now. Yet the man honored in this volume is one of the few with a pedagogical gift that reminds us of Lagrange’s standard.