Talk:Augustus De Morgan

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Hello. From searching the web for some of the text of the current version of this article, it looks like it is copied entirely from "Ten British Mathematicians of the 19th Century", by Alexander Macfarlane, dated 1916, at: http://www.gutenberg.net/etext06/tbmms10p.pdf (Project Gutenberg). That's great, no problem with copyright. The only thing I want to suggest here is that when source texts such as this are imported, it would be a good idea to put a note in the article or the talk page telling where it came from. Texts copied from other sources are an ongoing problem for Wikipedia -- let's make it easier to find the problematic articles by clearly labeling the ones that aren't a problem. Happy editing, Wile E. Heresiarch 05:53, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)

whichever ancient work it was copied from, the style is dreadful. totally inappropriate for a modern encyclopedia and not likely to enlighten many people about the mathematics it pretends to explain. hopefully someone will scrap the lot and write something from scratch.

Is it "de Morgan" or "De Morgan"? I've seen both used. What language uses "De" in names? Is capitalizing "De" the usual convention in it? Kaol 22:08, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I'm guessing "de", latin/french for "of". Speaking of latin, could somebody please translate this?

He once printed his name: Augustus De Morgan, H - O - M - O - P - A - U - C - A - R - U - M - L - I - T - E - R - A - R - U - M.

I'm sure that's something very humorous in Latin, but, unfortunately, I only understand English... (man of few words perhaps?)

crazyeddie 06:06, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)

It means "Man of few letters." They were going to confer on him the degree Doctor of Letters. --Polylerus 23:03, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

The word "de" means "of" in all major romance languages (in Italian, it's "di"). "de" in most French names is in lower case unless it starts a sentence. Correct me if I'm wrong. ~elviajero (talk • contribs)

[edit] The "de" or "De" discussion

Fellow fans of Augustus De Morgan,

"de" is the Dutch language article corresponding to the English article "the". Many Dutch and Belgian surnames use that article, such as "De Wolf" (the wolf) or "Van de Velden" (from Velden). My speculation is that De Morgan's surname is of Dutch origin, since "from Morgan" does not make sense to me at all. In that case, it is customary but not necessary for the surname to start with a higher-case "D" (that goes for many other languages, e.g. I have a friend whose surname is "de Oliveira" and another whose surname is "De Rossi").

By the way, was I the only one to notice many parts of this article on De Morgan were copied from The MacTutor article?

Porcher 04:43, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

If you read the first comment in this Talk, you will see that they were both copied from the same source.Billlion 22:38, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

De Morgan doesn't seem Dutch to me, except if it were derived from De Morgen ("the morning"), though I can't find that name in the phonebook or on genealogy sites. Qwertyus 15:40, 24 May 2006 (UTC)