Any stories the list can share about similar things happening during
enforced downtime?
Not personal stories, but definitely cases of "enforced downtime":
Braudel's thesis*, which inspired the "long duration" school, was
composed in POW camp Oflag XII-B
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernand_Braudel#Biography
while sheaf cohomology was developed in Oflag XVII-A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheaf_cohomology
-Dave
* "The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip
II"
(sheaf cohomology "describes the obstructions to solving a geometric
problem globally when it can be solved locally", which in hindsight
is a somewhat ironic mathematical gadget to develop in a POW camp
during a World War. It is doubly ironic that the original french
term for sheaf, « faisceau », is cognate to the roman "fasces", which
were much admired by the people running said camps.
The general idea of a sheaf [on the off chance that silk-listers
might be more familiar with the late-XX Amber books by Zelazny than
with mid-XX books by french algebraic topologists] is that instead of
finding a single global solution [as in school mathematics, where,
say, x=42], the best one can do is to stitch together a series of
local solutions, which smoothly but steadily differ from each other
as one's reference point changes, so travelling between local
solutions is similar to travelling between the Shadows in Amber)
