Coconuts — injurious, mathematical, and medieval

This medical paper — “Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts” — perhaps suggests to you why the headline of this mathematic history paper — “Calculus Under the Coconut Palms: The Last Hurrah of Medieval Indian Mathematics” — may not be quite as accurate as one might desire it to be. Dr. Peter Barss, the author of the injuries paper, was awarded the 2001 Ig Nobel Prize for medicine.

A study called “The Medieval English Coconut” will be published in the journal The Medieval Globe, says an article called “Coconuts in Medieval England Weren’t as Rare as Monty Python and the Holy Grail Made You Think“, which itself was written by Kathleen E. Kennedy, and published in The Mary Sue. Here is a coconut-centric snippet from the film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”:

(Thanks to Mark Dionne for bringing the medieval item to our attention.)