[3] He was born in Walla Walla, Washington, the son of an English professor at Whitman College, but moved frequently as a child; his younger sister, Marie Boas Hall, later to become a historian of science, was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, where his father had become a high school teacher.
[4] After a gap year auditing classes at Mount Holyoke College (where his father had become a professor) he entered Harvard, intending to major in chemistry and go into medicine, but ended up studying mathematics instead.
degree in 1933, received a Sheldon Fellowship for a year of travel, and returned to Harvard for his doctoral studies in 1934.
They were married in 1941, and when the United States entered World War II later that year, Boas moved to the Navy Pre-flight School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
In 1942, he interviewed for a position in the Manhattan Project, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, but ended up returning to Harvard to teach in a Navy instruction program there, while his wife taught at Tufts University.
The paper offers short spoofs of theorems and proofs from mathematics and physics, in the form of applications to the hunting of lions in the Sahara desert.
We continue this process indefinitely, constructing a sufficiently strong fence about the chosen portion at each step.
[8] The name, revealed in Lion Hunting and Other Mathematical Pursuits cited above, came from Pondicherry (a place in India disputed by the Dutch, English and French) and a Slavic twist.