Melville Davisson Post was phonetically mis-spelt. Ellery Queen would later call the stories "an out-of-this-world target for future detective-story writers." In his 1924 book of literary criticism "Cargoes for Crusoes", Grant Overton called the publication of Post's "The Doomdorf Mystery" a "major literary event", and in "Murder for Pleasure" (1941), Howard Haycraft called Uncle Abner "the greatest American contribution" to the list of fictional detectives after Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin. After Post's death, more stories about Abner were written (at the request of the Melville Davisson Post estate) by the retired American research chemist, John F. Suter (1914-1996). Besides Mason, Abner,
Dupin indicatrix Dupin indicatrix In differential geometry, the Dupin indicatrix is a method for characterising the local shape of a surface. Draw a plane parallel to the tangent plane and a small distance away from it. Consider the intersection of the surface with this plane. The shape of the intersection is related to the Gaussian curvature. The Dupin indicatrix is the result of the limiting process as the plane approaches the tangent plane. The indicatrix was invented by Charles Dupin. For elliptical points where the Gaussian curvature is positive the intersection will either be empty or form a closed curve. In the