Q: Why did the mathematician name his dog "Cauchy?" A: Because he left a residue at every pole. Mystery Mathematician #3 Revealed!

What does that say about me that I am amused by that famous pun in the title of this post! Cauchy has always been a favorite of mine and his famous Integral Formula has blighted the youth of many young mathematicians in their Complex Analysis course! I recall one of my high school colleagues annually wearing a T-shirt with this formula imprinted on it on the day of the math finals. I don't believe it gave away any answers to her students!

Anyhow, we did have two winners in this week's contest. I intentionally did not announce this edition of the contest in a post as I wanted to see who would notice the new image in the sidebar! BTW, I certainly didn't expect my Technorati rating or Social Ranking to spike because of this and I was not disappointed!

Winners:
TC
Lynx

Here are TC's 'punny' comments:

Hi Dave,

It is not as if you had exhausted most others that you had to pick a
'residual' mathematician :-)

I first thought it might be L'Hospital.

Interesting anecdote:

Lagrange advised Cauchy's father that his son should obtain a good
grounding in languages before starting a serious study of mathematics.


Here's Lynx's comment/anecdote about Monsieur Cauchy:

The mathematician is Augustin-Louis Cauchy.

A quote by him (courtesy of www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk): [Regarding √(-1)]: ... we can repudiate completely and which we can abandon without regret because one does not know what this pretended sign signifies nor what sense one ought to attribute to it.
Said in 1847

Also, according to Agnesi to Zeno Over 100 Vignettes from the History of Math by Sanderson Smith, he was a teacher at the Ecole Polytechnique. While Evariste Galois was trying to gain admission, Cauchy lost a paper written by the young man.

He was a staunch Catholic and, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03457a.htm): During the famine of 1846 in Ireland Cauchy made an appeal to the pope on behalf of the stricken people.

According to this website (http://web01.shu.edu/projects/reals/history/cauchy.html), Cauchy delayed the publication of Niels Abel's masterpiece because Abel called him a bigoted Catholic.


Okay, that's enough. I'm done researching for now. Thanks for an evening of entertainment.