A dunce cap, also variously known as a dunce hat, dunce's cap, or dunce's hat, is a tall conical hat. In popular culture, it is typically made of paper and often marked with a D, and given to schoolchildren to wear as punishment for being stupid or lazy. While this is now a rare practice, it is frequently depicted in popular culture such as children's cartoons. Such headwear is most prevalent in Western culture but achieved a certain prevalence in modern China in connection with various elements of the communist movement.

Contents

1 Origins 2 Topology 3 Trivia 4 External links

Origins

The word "dunce" was originally a reference to John Duns Scotus, a 13th century scholastic theologian, whose books on theology, philosophy, and logic were University textbooks. His followers, termed "Dunsmen" or "Dunses", were later challenged about their hodgepodge system of hair-splitting and needless distinctions. Their obstinacy over an increasing array of challenges posed first by humanists and then by reformers, led to the term "dunses" to denote fools in general.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edition), "dunce cap" didn't enter the language until after the term "dunce" was so transformed. John Ford's 1624 play The Sun's Darling is the first recorded mention of the related term "dunce table", a table provided for duller or poorer students; "dunce cap" appears first in the 1840 novel The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens.

The Straight Dope notes that Duns Scotus accepted the wearing of conical hats to increase learning, in the belief that it would funnel knowledge to its wearer (and perhaps in emulation of wizards).

Topology

In topology, the dunce hat is a compact space formed by taking a solid triangle and gluing all three sides together, with the orientation of one side reversed. Simply gluing two sides oriented in the same direction would yield a cone much like the layman's dunce cap, but the gluing of the third side results in a manifold that, like the Klein bottle, is difficult to depict. The dunce hat has a number of interesting properties. Notably, the dunce hat is contractible, though this is very difficult to show explicitly.

Trivia

• In NetHack, the dunce cap is one of two types of conical hats, the other being the cornuthaum . Dunce caps protect against Illithid brain sucking attacks [1].

External links

• "What's the origin of the dunce cap?", from The Straight Dope website
• Notes from an Introduction to Topology course, from a University of Oklahoma website, with depictions of the topological dunce hat