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A note of late February 2017.
I originally began the creation of this - my first web site - when I worked in the Mathematics Department of St. Patrick's College (Drumcondra, Dublin). It went public in the summer of 1999, and I made what I thought would be my final additions to it in August 2007, when I resigned my post as head of the college's Mathematics Department. When the college fully amalgamated with Dublin City University in 2016 my original web site was discontinued by the university, and I have only been able to preserve it - and modify in places - through the sterling efforts of a son-in-law
(Fiachra Lennon;
Fiachra's father is the artist Paddy Lennon),
without whom none of this would have been possible. For those who might be interested this is how it was done: first Fiachra obtained a CD with the entire contents of my frozen-in-time old web site, and he created an Archive section
(at my new web site). Then he introduced me to the wonders of a remarkable FREE software called
FileZilla,
one that enabled me to carry out the editing (e.g., repair or remove outdated web links, add new material, ... ). I will add more here from time to time.
In one corner of my this old web site (Fermat6) is an unpublished paper of mine, 'Could there exist a sixth Fermat prime? I believe it is not impossible.' At the top of that paper I wrote: For my wife, Mary, and in memory of my parents Annie Sands (1900-1967) and Seán Cosgrave (1906-1995) and now, as I make my final additions (at the time of original writing, August 2007) to my site, I repeat that same dedication.
Here is a photograph
with my parents in it (from the left: Mum, Mrs Murray, Anne McDonagh, Dad, and Ciarán Maguire
(an uncle of
the renowned Irish chef, Neven Maguire)
at their school in Bailieboro, taken in the early 1960s; and here is one of
my mother's garden
- a beautiful place - at the back of our home in Henry Street, Bailieboro. Dad did some gardening - always in a suit - but it was
Mum's garden.
I used to love climbing those trees at the bottom of the garden. Once, when I was perhaps ten years old, with a nearby tree (which I later tried
to paint, in London, when I was a student there), I turned my back on it, and wondered if it was still there... I tried turning quickly to see if
I would find that it had gone away... Many years later I read somewhere - in Bertrand Russell? - that others had done that over the years. And here is
that tree, in a photograph I took recently.
There are many more photographs of my parents, family, and friends in the Autobiography corner of my web site.
A note of Easter Monday, April 2017. My wife and I swim at
Seapoint
almost every day, and recently I got into a chance conversation there with the artist
John Short,
who kindly gave me permission to insert the following painting of his here at my web site:
" Do not be too concerned about your current disappointment. The best that any mathematician can really hope for is to prove some first class theorems and have them understood and appreciated by a few good mathematicians ... " Marco Schutzenberger, from G.E.Andrews' (we are in the same photo here) article " Some debts I owe''.
Kazuya Kato's
PRIME NUMBERS poem sums up my own feelings about them.
My author royalties from the sale of Folding Landscapes' A Prime For The Millennium booklet (an explanatory email to my niece Jo and nephew Ben) go to the Irish Cancer Society. See the Millennium prime booklet section of my site for further details.
There is another photograph from the Kennys launch in the
Photographs section of my site.
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Contact details. jbcosgrave at gmail.com
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