Dear Dmitri,

Mnogoye leto! and thanks for the fascinating update. To quote Lady Bracknell, "A life full of incident, I see!"

I have one little frog (i.e. question): do you think it possible  that your father only knew the word "lemniscate" from a chance encounter in his dictionary (where it certainly is)? This seems, while possible, rather unlikely.

Since the word was coined by J. Bernouilli (I think I finally have the correct spelling) (buried in Bern, to correct another misspelling of mine), it seems to me that by using this word he must have been alluding to the mathematician who discovered the phenomenon [it is not a simple figure of 8) and coined the word -- oder?


CK