
Thinking Like a Mathematician (1985) - jasim
http://news.psu.edu/story/141474/1985/03/01/research/thinking-mathematician
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GFK_of_xmaspast
Does anybody know what this work was:

"In 1975, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech called Krantz with a
problem. Pictures of Venus and Mars transmitted by the Voyager spacecraft had
been taken in the dark while the craft was moving, and were, as was expected,
horribly blurred. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory had a deblurring technique
using an on-board computer that logged the spacecraft's motion, but the
technique took a month and Congress wanted to see the pictures now. A
researcher discovered a way to unblur the pictures more quickly if he could
factor polynomials of several variables in a certain way. He called Krantz and
asked him how to do it. "I thought about it for a while, and then I said, 'It
can't be done.' Like most people, he just assumed that he had called the wrong
person."

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GIFtheory
Funny--I came here for the same reason. My best guess is that they were trying
to solve a deconvolution problem the naive way (by solving a huge linear
system). I think the reference to polynomial factorization might have
something to do with solving the problem by taking the Z-transform of both
sides, and then having to divide the resulting polynomials and invert the
transform.

------
Someone
For the demonstration at the end that shows that it is harder to perturb an
almost circle into a circle than doing the reverse I would use the perfectly
circular rim of a bicycle wheel.

It is easy to make such a wheel "almost round", but virtually impossible to
revert that action.

~~~
Retra
That may not be a very good analogy, depending on what the theorem actually
says.

