Pursuit (1976) Having finished the math courses offered by the school, I spent my senior year teaching myself, detached from Mr. Joffray. I'd sit alone for an hour every day in an empty class- room, reading a textbook on multivariable calculus or trying to rederive Huygens's results about cycloidal pendulums. At other times I did a kind of research, often about chase problems. These problems of pursuit, as mathematicians call them, completely captivated me. The first one I ever heard of came from Mr. Joffray. It went like this: suppose a postman is trying to escape from a