Respaldo

He dado con un curioso escrito al depurar la bandeja de salida de mi cuenta de email en Zbipp:

Professor Knuth,

In Concrete Mathematics, page 23, line 24, there is a statement concerning the number of appearances of the Σ sign within the book. It reads there that it's nothing compared with the appearances of the symbol in The Iliad. Well, now that I've just finished counting the instances of it in the aforementioned text by Homer, I can't agree with you on this matter anymore: the sign Σ appears less than a hundred times in the epic poem traditionally attributed to Homer.

So, unless you were referring to someone else's Iliad, presumably not Homer's, or meant sigma (Σ and σ), your claim is inaccurate and in need of some rewriting.

I hope you can let me know whether you have been told about this already.

Truly yours,
J. H. S.
(September 19, 2006)

La respuesta a la misiva anterior llegaría unas cuantas horas después:

Dear (my nom de plume),

Nice try, but the characters Σ and σ were not invented until many centuries after Homer's time. You must have been looking at a transliteration made fairly recently (i.e. less than 1000 years ago).

Cordially,
Don Knuth

La contestación marcaba el fin de mi primer intento por obtener el tan preciado dólar hexadecimal de parte de Knuth... El señor tendría el detalle de agregar después que en las primeras versiones escritas de la Ilíada sólo había sigmas mayúsculas pues, en general, las letras minúsculas no entrarían a formar parte del alfabeto griego sino hasta muchísimos años después...