Gulliver's return to the land without one, two, three

pp. 315-319

in: Karl Menger, Selected papers in logic and foundations, didactics, economics, Berlin, Springer, 1979

Abstract

Gulliver's interest in advanced mathematics can be traced to adventures not mentioned by Swift and only recently recorded.¹ They took place on an island which, because of the current sophisticated symbols for numbers used there, the traveller called the Land without One, Two, Three. Upon his return to Europe, Gulliver studied, both in England and on the Continent, what then (that is, in the early 1700's) was the most modern topic of investigations: the functions x, x², x³, √x, cos x, log x, … .