31 March 2009

17 Gauss Way

MSRI (the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute) is located at 17 Gauss Way, Berkeley, California. Here's a picture.

Of course, Gauss constructed the 17-gon with ruler and compass and was very proud of this. This article says it's not a coincidence, and so does this official MSRI document.

And rather surprisingly, that's not the only thing on Gauss Way. The Space Sciences Laboratory is at 7 Gauss Way. I'm not sure what significance 7 has, if any.

Todd Trimble said...

Gauss apparently was the first to conjecture the necessary and sufficient condition on n for a regular n-gon to be constructible, and n = 7 is of course the first that doesn't satisfy that condition.

dimpase said...

When I stayed at MSRI few years back, the address was different (that was before the renovation that saw the whole show moved downtown Berkeley for a while)

I generally see the American way of naming streets and numbering buildings as unhelpful as it gets :)

unapologetic said...

As opposed to...?