An anonymous traveler on the Path writes:
Actually, the French group is a subsidiary of our Bavarian operation. However, "centuries" is, well, somewhat inaccurate, though the mathematician who first mentioned our existence about that time has since recanted after a visit from the Elders...
"Centuries" was perhaps an exaggeration. I first became aware of the existance of the French group when Martin Gardner published an extremely interesting April Fool's edition of "Mathematical Games" in Scientific American a number of years back. The thesis of his piece was that some very simple expressions involving transcendental numbers such as Pi and E had been proven to be integers. When you checked them on a calculator, they did indeed appear to be exact integers, in spite of a well-known theorem which claimed otherwise. The clever trick was that they were of course transcendental, but differed from integers by a small epsilon far beyond the 15 digit range of most ordinary calculators. A number of us were trying to figure out how Martin Gardner had constructed the expressions he had published, and quickly found that doing so was a non-trivial mathematical problem. We were about to give up when a young associate professor walked in, picked up a piece of chalk, and demonstrated a really clever trick involving rings which permitted one to crank out such expressions with the greatest of ease. When we inquired as to the origin of the work he was citing, we were told that this really clever mystical order in France had recently decided to release this particular discovery into the public domain, where it had served as the source for Martin Gardner's baffling column. Perhaps they will give us a factoring algorithm if we ask them nicely. :) -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd@netcom.com $ via Finger. $