The following anecdote illustrates the level of the initial
confusion. The first elaborate graphical computation of the
eigenvalues of the area led to the mysterious formula
, with integer
p
. One day, Junichi Iwasaki, at the time a student, stormed into
my office and told me to rewrite the formula in terms of the half
integer
. This yields the very familiar expression for the eigenvalues
of the
SU
(2) Casimir
. Nobody had previously noticed this fact.