June 2012 Contents Elliptic Curves lead off this issue, as
Adrian Rice and Bud Brown trace the continuous side of their
history, and warn us against confusing them with ellipses. We
hear from Henry Gould and Jocelyn Quaintance about combinatorial
identities involving double factorials. Or would you prefer
triangles? You'll find theorems about intersecting cevians and
triangle centers—as well as a Miracle by Morley, but this
miracle is not about triangles. —Walter Stromquist, Editor Why
Ellipses Are Not Elliptic Curves Adrian Rice and Ezra Brown
Elliptic curves are a fascinating area of algebraic geometry
with important connections to number theory, topology, and
complex analysis. As their current ubiquity in mathematics
suggests, elliptic curves have a long and fascinating history
stretching back many centuries. This paper presents a survey of
key points in their development, via elliptic integrals and
functions, closing with an explanation of why no elliptically-
shaped planar curved line may ever be called a