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ALGEBRA (⇐), LEWIS AND CLARK, AND TREASURE ISLAND
Remember? "Unraveling" or KIKBAK or WORKING BACKWARD from THE KNOWN ANSWER to the INITIALLY UNKNOWN FACTORS LEADING TO THE ANSWER: NUMALGEBRA (Ü) ® ARITHMETIC (Þ).

That is as old as Hommy Hominid finding his way home by retracing his tracks.

For SEA-FARERS and LAND-FARERS, this query occupied a powerful program known as "Dead Reckoning".

Try to remember the directions going out and the pace of going and you can use a "mental map" or an actual one to trace or track your way back.

Did you see Ken Burn's superb PBS documentary about the greatLewis and Clark "survey" of "The Louisiana Purchase" made by Thomas Jefferson, procuring for the United States so much of our western territory? The narrator said that Lewis and Clark applied DEAD RECKONING to the MAP information and committed an incredibly small error for the entire trip!

You see DEAD RECKONING in the hunt for buried treasure in Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. On the Island, led by Long John Silver, members of the crew of the (diseased) Pirate Chief Flint followed directions of a map to seek the treasure buried by Flint years before.

On p. 261 of the novel, we read the directions:

		"Tall tree, Spy-glass shoulder, bearing a point to
     		the N. of N.N.E.
     		Skeleton Island E.S.E. and by E.
     		Ten feet."
Since these imply VECTORS (denoting SPEED and DIRECTION), they belong to VECTOR ALGEBRA(⇐), not NUMALGEBRA (⇐). But the motif of WORKING BACKWARDS is the same -- WORKING BACKWARDS from MAP DIRECTIONS to seek where "x marks the spot" to dig.

Very HITEACH DEAD RECKONING is implicit in the "Kalman filter" which, among other accomplishements, guided Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in their Moon Landing on July 20, 1969.

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