Good old days, politics and mathematics

2012 will be, in several countries, a presidential election year. Some decades ago, candidates were not always supposed to spend months on some demagogicdemocratic debates, but had time to spend on more important problems. Like mathematics... For instance, a congressman, who became the 20th president of the United States, James Garfield, gave the following proof to the Pythagorean theorem (actually, he wrote that proof five years before he become President). The legend claims that he found th..