My Little Red Lie

This story has been told repeatedly on the campus of the Lewis Carroll School of Logic.
I re-tell it here with a slight adjustment of fact.

In 1865, the initial publication of Alice in Wonderland was such a success throughout England, that the prevailing monarch approached the author with a special request. Queen Victoria asked Lewis Carroll to dedicate his next book to her.
"I will indeed dedicate the next thing I write to you, your Majesty," replied the author.
He did exactly that. However, Lewis Carroll was also known as Charles Lewis Dodgson, a professor at Oxford University. The next thing he wrote, after Alice in Wonderland was not a book but a Math research paper entitled Self-Generating Pythagorean Quadruples and N-Tuples.

I compromised the little red lie with a strike-through.The title of Professor Dodgson's Victorian-dedicated research paper was An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.
The author of the Pythagorean Quadruple paper was me.

YOU, the genuinely intelligent reader, might ask "Why are you telling me this?" (And your intelligence would be doubled if perchance you remembered a blogpost entitled Magreetings.)
I, the ersatz intelligent blogger, might will answer "Because I occasionally have a problem with Ego Control."

Years before the publication of my Pythagorean Quad formula, years before mathematicians the world over learned how it works, countless students at an obscenely under-achieving school learned how to apply the formula. The school, of course, was Jefferson High in South-Central Los Angeles. No student of mine understood the formula better than CARMEN CASAS. Her name has been unchanged to applaud the worthy.
Another name that will be unchanged is CRAIG PICELLA, a Math colleague of mine. He suggested my having Carmen demonstrate the Quad formula to Jefferson's Math & Science teachers.
There was no way those teachers could have known the formula because I invented it. I went out of my way to invite the Principal to the presentation.
Carmen did such a magnificent job of explaining the Quad formula, everyone in the room gave her a rousing ovation.
I did not drive home from school that day, I floated!