Dear Marta, Yes, I am sure Saunders saw his excursions into geometrical mechanics as a `hobby', and wasn't seeking to make original contributions (other than, perhaps, a new way of looking at established results). I remember, when I was in Chicago in 1975--76, he asked me whether I knew L.A. (Alan) Pars, a Cambridge mathematician whose book on dynamics was one of his favoured sources. (At the time I didn't know him -- he had retired long before I first went to Cambridge -- but I did meet him subsequently. He was then in his nineties, and was delighted to learn that Saunders was a fan of his work.) Regarding the spelling of Saunders's surname: my recollection is that, once he had decided to adopt the space in `Mac Lane', he was quite insistent that everyone should use it. Since that happened well before 1968, it's surprising that he allowed `MacLane' to stand on the title page of those 1968 notes. Best regards, Peter On Oct 27 2017, Marta Bunge wrote:
Dear George,
Although I have yet to read the Saunders MacLane's notes on "Geometrical Mechanics" for a course given in Chicago in 1968 in some more detail, just perusing them seems to me that the notes in question are based on several sources which are explicitly mentioned in them and that are well known in the subject matter. I doubt therefore that Saunders himself may have thought of them as original in any way. Doubtless they must have been useful to his students as well as to himself, for instance when writing Chapter VIII (Forms of Space) and Chapter IX (Mechanics) of his very nice book "Mathematics Form and Function", Springer-Verlag, 1968.
I am still not sure myself whether to write "Mac Lane" or "MacLane", and I certainly did not know the story behind his opting for the latter. I am sure that these notes will be useful to anybody not familiar with the material exposed on them, and that we should certainly thank Harry Dole for his having provided us with them.
Sincerely,
Marta
************************************************ Marta Bunge Professor Emerita Dept of Mathematics and Statistics McGill University Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 2K6 bunge@math.mcgill.ca ************************************************
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