Sherlock Holmes primarily relies on abduction: inferring an explanation for observed details. "From a drop of water", he writes, "a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other". In "A Scandal in Bohemia", Holmes infers that Watson had got wet lately and had "a most clumsy and careless servant girl". When Watson asks how Holmes knows this, the detective answers: In the first Holmes story, "A Study in Scarlet", Dr. Watson compares Holmes to C. Auguste Dupin, Edgar Allan Poe's fictional detective, who employed a similar methodology. Alluding to
Dupin cyclide "R" are a 3-dimensional vectors, and "A" and "B" are constants. Families of cyclides give rise to various cyclidic coordinate geometries. In Maxime Bôcher's 1891 dissertation, "Ueber die Reihenentwickelungen der Potentialtheorie", it was shown that the Laplace equation in three variables can be solved using separation of variables in 17 conformally distinct quadric and cyclidic coordinate geometries. Many other cyclidic geometries can be obtained by studying R-separation of variables for the Laplace equation. Dupin cyclide In mathematics, a Dupin cyclide or cyclide of Dupin is any geometric inversion of a standard torus, cylinder or double cone. In particular, these latter