JOST A MON

The idle ramblings of a Jack of some trades, Master of none

Jan 10, 2016

Another Year In Reading

So, 2015 is over. This was the year my blogging ground to a halt, my habits became even more sedentary, my achievements negligible, and my travels were to Orlando, for heaven's sake. Another year like that and I might as well throw in a nearby towel and take up life on some bend in a river, pondering the existence of fish.

To be honest, this year is not off on the thumpingest of starts. My washing machine conked out and the delivery guys of a new one couldn't install it. My patience with incompetence is also thinning. I've been lugging heaps of apparel to a laundrette and obtaining a renewed appreciation for subcontinental people who breaks stones with clothes. At the same time, various neighbours and municipal councillors have been casting beady eyes on a bit of renovation we're planning. I have half a mind to invite some illegals to occupy the jungly garden at the back and encourage them to throw nightly parties just to keep the neighbours bright and interested.

******

The reading was down on the previous three years. I managed 118 books. In this I'm way behind that powerhouse, M. Orthofer, doyen of the Complete Review, who polishes off probably three hundred books a year and manages to review ⅔ of them.

Some books were brilliant and others were absolute dogs. This is no news.

But here are some stats to start off:

Fiction - 80%
Women authors - 30%
Translations - 43%
Countries (non-English) - 14
Languages other than English - 25

My first Basque translation, I think, and my first book by an Eritrean author. And my first Dogri and Rajasthani translations.

LanguageCount
French6
German4
Italian4
Russian4
Spanish4
Arabic3
Portuguese3
Finnish2
Hebrew2
Polish2
Swedish2
Assamese1
Basque1
Catalan1
Czech1
Dogri1
Dutch1
Gujarati1
Korean1
Oriya1
Rajasthani1
Slovenian1
Turkish1
Urdu1
*******

For a quick roundup of recommended titles, I start with non-fiction.

Catherine Merridale, Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia's History: a riveting account of the Moscow Kremlin, from its earliest to latest incarnations, and the worrisomely brutal types that lived in it, destroyed it, refashioned it, and bent it to their own interpretations of history.

Caleb Scharf, The Copernicus Complex: The Quest for Our Cosmic (In)Significance: what an incredible repositioning of the human experience bang into the centre of the Universe! One of the biggest advances of science has been the demotion of humanity and the Earth from their egocentric position in the cosmos and the realisation that in almost every respect and at every scale of the Universe, we are negligible and not special. But Scharf reveals the latest thinking in cosmology and quantum physics that shows this 'Copernican' principle needs to be modified in the light of all sorts of special events that should have taken place for the Universe to be as it is, for the solar system to have developed, and for our remarkable appearance at a particular juncture in time when we can actually learn something of the Universe. Superb.

Mariusz Szczygieł, Gottland : Mostly True Stories from Half of Czechoslovakia: Indians would no doubt fondly recall Bata, that ever-present purveyor of shoes. The story of his ruthless rise to power is well told in this Polish author's superb collection of essays (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) on lesser-known aspects of Czechoslovakia's Communist and capitalist avatars. As a fellow Iron Curtain survivor, his insights into the paranoia and delusions of the Czechs are sympathetic, accurate and mordant.

Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams, Ocean Worlds: The story of seas on Earth and other planets: a wonderful, detailed and erudite study of what water means for a planet, how it gets there, what happens to it, how it escapes it, and - the atmosphere! plate tectonics! evolution! life! extraterrestrial worlds! It's all mind-blowing and absolutely superb.

I should mention Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, which was a best-seller in India, if less covered in the mainstream press in the UK: although it purports to be a non-Eurocentric perspective of world history, to me it did seem more like a study of the effects of the rest of the world on Europe than a proper history of that rest of the world. I'm not putting it very well, but ultimately it disappointed me for its lack of coverage of enormous swathes of the planet - Africa and Latin America were almost completely ignored, and Oceania and China were given rather short shrift. There was much talk of trade links but very little of scientific and cultural cross-pollination. I suspect a properly non-Eurocentric world history can be fashioned from this one, using its superb bibliography, which by itself is worth the price of the book.

*******

Now a bit of fiction.

When I read bildungsromans like Stefanie de Velasco's Tiger Milk, it occurs to me I completely missed out during my teen years. No sneaking out of the house at odd hours, no wild parties, no unprotected sex with people with mid-life crises, no adulterated liquors, no drugs, no creativity. Damn. I was a nerd, so that might explain much of the relative joylessness, but the young girls in this German novel (translated by Tim Mohr) are bright and sensitive and yet get into such heaps of self-inflicted tribulations, I'm glad (in retrospect) I grew up completely boring.

Alena Graedon has fashioned a very scary near future in The Word Exchange where people's addictions to their smart devices and information retrieval via instant Google searches can be co-opted for profit by private enterprises. Already there's research showing people think they're smarter than they are because they can look up facts on the internet, and simultaneously there's a devaluation of people and cultures that are not present on the web (note the widespread consequences of gender and cultural biases in Wikipedia). Graedon's dystopia is only slightly incredible but it's frightening - grab it for some sleepless nights of worry.

The Sudanese writer Amir Tag Elsir's Arabic novel African Titanics (translated by Charis Bredin and Emily Danby) is the story of desperate emigrants trying every way to get to Europe. Topical, of course, but adumbrated by the stories they tell each other, this book lends another perspective to the horrors of their crossing.

(I'm in awe of Charis Bredin, who I think is still a student and yet she has a couple of translations published already. In awe and deeply envious.)

I was so taken up by Esmahan Aykol's Baksheesh, (translated by Ruth Whitehouse), one of her series of crime novels featuring Kati Hirschel, a feisty Istanbullu detective-book-shop owner, that I went and created a Wikipedia article for the author.

What is the use of those obscene Emiratis and Saudis and Qataris who do nothing of any artistic or scientific consequence with their immense wealth, in comparison to the indigent Egyptians and Maghrebis and Syrians? Take the writer Ali Al-Muqri's Hurma (translated T. M. Aplin) - what an insight into the lives of Yemeni women and their desperate attempts to take ownership of themselves in a claustrophobically patriarchal and hypocritical society.

I should also mention Jacob and Dulce, a bitingly satirical dissection of Indo-Portuguese life in Goa in those pre-Independence days by Gip (nom-de-plume of Francisco João da Costa; translated by Alvaro Noronha da Costa), one of the very few really readable translations from the Sahitya Akademi.

And finally the sharply observed short stories of Ahmed Essop, South-African writer of Indian origin, Hajji Musa and the Hindu Fire-walker are well worth the read.

*******

Have a superb 2016, folks.

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Sep 3, 2014

Strangest Man's Food

It was only when he was in his 80s that Paul Dirac's digestive ailment was finally diagnosed. Eating, for him, was a chore and a burden. 
Dirac always felt out of place at fancy college dinners. Rich food, vintage wine, antiquated formalities, florid speeches, the fetid smoke of after-dinner cigars - all were anathema to him. So he was probably not looking forward to the evening of Wednesday, 9 November 1927, when he was to be one of the toasts of a dinner to celebrate the election of three new fellows to St John's College. He was now certifiably a 'first-rate man', with a permanent seat at the college's high table. [...] Dirac celebrated his election to the fellowship in the traditional way, by consuming an eight course meal that included oysters, a consommé, cream of chicken soup, sole, veal escalope and spinach, pheasant with five vegetables and side salad, and three desserts. For him, the meal was not so much a celebration as a penance.

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Oct 12, 2013

Spitalfields and Mathematics

Spitalfields, the area just to the east of Liverpool Street station, is known for its thriving immigrant communities over the centuries. Jews, Huguenots, Bengalis; silk-weavers, bakers, brewers, artificers, opticians, and - would you believe it - mathematicians. In 1717, Thomas Middleton established the Spitalfields Mathematical Society, which was open to local residents, would serve to disseminate mathematical knowledge among them, and also encourage the members ('the square of 8' in number) to educate each other with questions and puzzles. Middleton himself was a teacher of navigational mathematics to sailors, and he started off the society by offering free lessons to his fellows. [1] 

 The Society would meet weekly for three hours, during which questions would be posed, tutorials offered and information exchanged.  
One of the rules of the Institution, which had so humble an origin, observed for upwards of eighty years was, that one hour during the time of the meeting should be devoted to silent study. The Stewards were accustomed to put a sand-glass on the table, and no one was allowed, under penalty of a fine, to open his lips until the sand had run down. [2]
One of the cunning ways in which the society encouraged collaboration was by levying small fines on anyone who refused to attempt to solve a query raised by a colleague. Fines accumulated in a fund that was then used to buy books!

 By the early 19th century, the society was offering public lectures (on topics such as 'galvanism', 'pneumatics', 'hydrostatics', and 'astronomy'). 

The members of this august association were not trained mathematicians for the most part, but some very able people did join. Simpson (of the Rule), Gompertz (of the law of mortality) and Dollond (the optician with Aitchison) were three of the famous men in the group. The others were less known but hardly slouches, and all appear to have been given to the use of mathematics in the solution of problems that they encountered in their professional lives.

 An interesting example is the use of mathematics to design a special instrument  called the bent-lever balance to control the fineness of yarn. The theory of this instrument was discussed by William Ludlam in 1765, using mechanics, trigonometry and calculus. [3]

 From the 1740s, the society also began to exhibit scientific instruments [4] and (no doubt inspired by the Royal Institution) conducted public experiments to much acclaim. Audiences of up to 500 people, paying sixpence per lecture, were reported. However, in the feverish period of the Napoleonic wars, the Seditious Meetings Acts passed in 1795 and 1799 began to cast a chill on societies such as this. They began to be closely monitored for discordant political views, and in 1809, experimental lectures were abandoned (ostensibly because lecturers were unavailable, but most likely for fear of prosecution). [5]

In 1846, faced with declining memberships, the society merged with the Royal Astronomical Society, and its library, archives and equipment were all handed over to the latter.

The Society occupied different premises during its lifetime - all in Spitalfields. It started at a pub, Monmouth's Head, moved to the White Horse in Wheeler Street eight years later, and then to the Ben Johnson's Head in Woodseer Street in 1735. During the 1770s and 1780s, it was based in the Black Swan, on Brown's Lane (later known as Hanbury Street). In 1793, it moved permanently to a room on Crispin Street, where it ended its life. The first pub became part of the Hanbury brewery; I can't tell what happened to the next two. Crispin Street lost much of itself when Spitalfields market expanded in the 1920s; the premises of the Society (No. 36/36A) were demolished in the same period.[6] 

 For several years now, the London Mathematical Society has funded Spitalfields Days in honour of the old society: believing that it is important for recent developments in specialist topics to be made known to the general mathematical community, and, in particular, to research students ... provides funds to the organisers of these meetings so that they can provide a day of survey lectures, accessible to a general mathematical audience.[7]

References
  1. The Spitalfields Mathematical Society, The MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive at the University of St. Andrews.
  2. James Mitchell, (Jan 20, 1828). "Mathematical Society in Spitalfields". The Gentlemen's Magazine, Vol 98, Part 1. 
  3. Norman Biggs (2009). 'Applicable Mathematics in the 18th Century: an example from the textile trade', presented at the IMA History of Mathematics Conference.
  4. Lucy Inglis, Georgian London: Into the Streets. Penguin. pp. 257-258.
  5. Margaret Jacob & Larry Stewart (2009). Practical Matter: Newton's Science in the Service of Industry and Empire: 1687-1851. Harvard University Press. pp. 112-113.
  6. 'Spitalfields Market area: No. 36/36A Crispin Street'. Chapter XI. Survey of London, Vol. 27. (pp. 127-147)
  7. Spitalfields Days, London Mathematical Society.

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Sep 18, 2012

18 September

A fairly nondescript day, you might think, 18 September. A vacant yet short-tempered fellow called Joseph of Cupertino, Italy, levitated seventy times in the seventeenth century and was first Inquisitioned and then raised to sainthood. This is his day. 
Leonhard Euler's fine turban and formula

It is also the day Leonhard Euler died in 1783. 

This was discussed, but not by that Foucault.
Jean-Baptiste-Leon Foucault the physicist was born the same day in 1819. 

Joseph Locke by mslrman, on Flickr.

Then it was Joseph Locke's turn to pass on (1860) - he was a civil engineer. 

Greta Garbo by Carmen Luna

Greta Garbo arrived in 1905. 

John Cockcroft by Rodrigo Moynihan.

Nobel-winning physicist John Cockcroft died on 18 September 1967. 

Jimi Hendrix by missperple

Then Jimi Hendrix departed this earthly vale of tears three years later.

So now you know.


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May 16, 2011

The Thirty-Fifth Giant’s Shoulders

What do you know, it’s that time of the month anew when birds chirp and the minds of bloggers turn to things festive and carnival-like. And so here we have the 35th instalment of the popular carnival of science. It promises to be a beaut. (Is it a beaut or is it a beaut? I’d say it is a beaut.)

History of Science

The first documented automaton is a flying dove from Greece in the 5th century BC. That knowledge transmitted itself subsequently to the Arab world. Medievalists.net have a short explanation.


If you were setting out to write a book about science and how it began, how and where would you begin? The question exercised Patricia Fara, who discusses it at Soapbox Science in Science: A Four Thousand Year History.

Down House (photo by Mario Modesto)
Have you been to Down House, where Charles Darwin and his family dwelt from 1842? If not, do so vicariously via John Graham-Cumming’s Geek Weekend: Charles Darwin’s Home.

Continuing the vicarious pleasures of armchair travel, check out Urban Ramblings, a post by Rupert Baker on the Royal Society’s connections with London at the History of Science Centre’s blog.

The teaching of evolution in the USA has long been a cauldron of political and religious trouble. In Political Descent, Piers Hale talks about the Scopes trial and other legal ramifications of what, essentially, should be a scientific issue.

Continuing on the theme of evolution, Asa Gray was Darwin’s supporter in America just as Thomas Huxley was in England. In Wired Science, David Dobbs recounts the story of Gray’s debates with Louis Agassiz that led to the respectability of evolutionary theory in the US. And – as a bonus – you can even read Gray’s review of the Origin of Species in the Atlantic Magazine.


Still on the topic of evolution, Dispersal of Darwin has a video charting the image of Charles Darwin over the years.


After Newton and Leibniz, a new rational philosophy took over the world of science, and people began to deride their predecessors (such as Athanasius Kircher) as scientific incompetents. BOOKTRYST has an article about a 1715 book that poked fun at Kircher and his fellows.


In the 1870s, the Dutch government decided to blow a ton of money on improving their scientific infrastructure, and assigned a million and a half guilders to Leiden University for, among other things, a new natural history museum. Where is that museum now? Collect and Connect explores.


Earth Sciences


In the Great War, the Austro-Hungarians created a special force called Kriegsgeologen, tasked with the use of geology for war. History of Geology describes them in War Geology.


Highly Allochthonous discusses whether large temblors beget more large temblors in The Many Faces of Earthquake Triggering.

 
Mathematics and Computing

The Osborne Company produced the first laptop computer way back in 1981. Have you ever heard of it? How to be a Retronaut tells you all about it.

Ravi Kannan recently won the 2011 Knuth prize for outstanding contributions to the foundations of computer science. Dick Lipton celebrates the achievement and discusses some of Kannan’s work at Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

Physics

James Maxwell is the genius extraordinaire responsible for the first great unifying theory of physics. 150 years ago, he published the first of four papers that comprised his tour de force. The Economist’s Babbage blog tells the story.

If you are interested in the early scientific history of fission, you can do no better than to read the review by Louis Turner; Ptak Science Books discusses it.

Whipple Library has an article about the Nernst lamp, an innovative light source brighter than filament lamps and not requiring the use of vacuum.


Pyro Optical Pyrometer
And, in the vein of lamps, can you use re-radiated heat to measure temperature? A Pyro Optical Pyrometer can come to your rescue, as Sebastian Assenza reveals at the University of Toronto's Scientific Instruments Collection.

There was a young lady named Fisk
Whose fencing was exceedingly brisk
    So fast was her action
    That the FitzGerald contraction
Reduced her rapier to a disk.

FitzGerald who? Skulls in the Stars talks about one of the first explainers of the famous Michelson-Morley experiments.

Astronomy and Space

In 1572, an English member of Parliament speculated - for the first time - on why (if the universe were infinite) the night sky was not fully lit up with stars in every line of sight.  Jost A Mon (in other words, me) tells the story.


The Earth and Moon as seen from Mercury (for some cosmononplusation; credit NASA)
Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts that light is bent as it passes near a gravitating object. What cosmological discoveries have been made by using this property of space? 365 Days of Astronomy has a nifty little podcast.

Chemistry

Abiotic genesis of life’s building blocks, anyone? The famous Miller and Urey experiments of the 1950s resulted in amino acids when a gloop of simple chemicals were subjected to electricity. Recent analysis of the vials left by Miller reveals that hydrogen sulphide in that primordial soup would have been even more efficacious. Life, Unbounded has the story.

Lavoisier and Paulze by Jacques-Louis David
Antoine Lavoisier, father of chemistry, was a great Enlightenment polymath, and Ian at SomeBeans describes some of his achievements.

Medicine and Pharmacology

If you have a pain in your spleen (and how would you know it was your spleen aching?), you can do no better than to follow Nicholas Culpepper’s advice from the 17th century, as Barbara blogs in 17th Century American Woman.


The lovely Res Obscura blog has excerpts and illustrations from a 1690 pharmacopoeia published in London. Check out  The Treasury of Drugs Unlock’d.

In medieval Europe, alchemy combined with medicine to produce a potent drug called Precipitato to restore the human body to its pristine natural state. It was so toxic that it required the most delicate handling. Read about it at William Eamon, Professor of Secrets.

Not that kind of Chirurgeon
Pickled lung tissue, anyone? The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice recounts how 18th century pathologists conducted post-mortems to investigate lung cancer.

Shortly after Dr Hahnemann published a paper in the British Medical Journal in 1859 on his new ‘discipline’ of homoeopathy, a Glasgow doctor named William Gairdner issued an exacting and trenchant critique. Memoirs of a Defective Brain has the story.

Smells Like Science has the story of Ether and the Discovery of Anesthesia.


And, in the vein of anesthesia, Providentia provides the details on The Chloroform Man.

Life Sciences

In the 16th century, people believed that there were fundamentally no differences in male and female genitalia, one being a mirror image of the other. Mirabile Visu talks about this gender inversion.


In 1733, two Swedish workmen reported finding a dull but live frog inside a boulder they had just cut open. Over the centuries, there have been other reports of immured yet live creatures found. Hoax or not? The History of Geology investigates in Toad in a Hole.


Lichens from Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (1904)
Ptak Science Books has a piece on Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (1904), a compendium of staggeringly lovely lifeforms found in nature.


Speaking of staggeringly lovely, have you seen BibliOdyssey's article on the Flora Sinensis, the first Western book (1656) to document the sub-tropical flora of China?

Why do people still insist that apes are not monkeys? It’s all down to an old taxonomy that is today quite obsolete, says PaoloV at Zygoma.


In the 1950s, Anna Pistorius created an illustrated book of dinosaurs for kids. Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs has some lovely scans and explanations from it.

Kristina Killgrove, a biological anthropologist at UNC Chapel Hill, recounts the story of the ill-fated Tudor ship Mary Rose and describes isotopic studies aimed to determine the origins of its sailors in Powered by Osteons.


[And that’s it for May 2011, folks! Thanks to all those who submitted articles (and especially to Thony C., indefatigable as ever, for finding fascinating tidbits in the scientific blogosphere). I hope this encourages you to write up your own pieces on science and its history and philosophy. Do consider submitting your blog article to the next edition of the giant's shoulders. You can use the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the blog carnival index page.]

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Jan 29, 2011

The Sun is a Star

It is only fairly recently in human history that people realised that our Sun is a star. For this discovery, we have to thank Father Angelo Secchi, the Vatican’s Chief Astronomer, and his work in stellar spectroscopy.
Father Angelo Secchi
Spectroscopy involves passing light from a source through a prism to break it up into its constituent colours. If the light is absolutely ‘pure’, the spectrum observed will be continuous, with no breaks. But if the light has passed through any transparent medium (other than vacuum, of course), the medium will take out some portions of the spectrum in a very characteristic way: dark lines appear where the light was absorbed. Every element in the Universe has its own characteristic spectrum, and by studying the dark lines, we can identify the materials that the light went through.
Solar Spectrum
In the 19th century, Father Secchi used an observatory above his church in Rome to gather light from the Sun. He split the light into its components, and then magnified each portion to study it more clearly. He discovered – at the edge of the Sun – a revelation.
Secchi Observatory, Rome
Galileo, centuries earlier, had determined that the Sun was not an unblemished disc: it has spots that move, from which he inferred that the Sun rotates around its axis. But that was as far as the Sun’s imperfection went. Nobody had suspected that there were emanations from the Sun’s outer layers, prominences and flares. True, during eclipses, scientists had observed the solar corona before Secchi, but the brightness of the sunlight prevented closer study. Secchi found patterns and movement in the corona that nobody had seen before.
Edge of the Sun
With Secchi’s technique, astronomers could study not only the edges but also the body of the Sun. Galileo’s sunspots were revealed as Earth-sized tears in its surface. The surface itself bubbled before their eyes. Soon they were able to identify the chemicals that made up the Sun. Dark bands in the spectrum revealed the presence of hydrogen, calcium and iron, and also an element that had previously been unknown on Earth. It was named after the Greek Sun god Helios – helium.

In 1862, Father Secchi turned his spectroscope to the night sky to see what the stars were made of. He recognised the pattern of chemicals immediately. They were all but identical to the Sun’s.

And thus, one of the great mysteries of the heavens was resolved. Our Sun is a star.

(From Episode 5: Star of the BBC's superb 1999 series The Planets)

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Aug 3, 2010

Fielders To Watch?

To be invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians is a great honour, and to be forty years of age or younger is doubly impressive, for it means that you might be very well in with a chance to win the Fields Medal. I thought I might scan through the list of speakers at the ICM 2010 site and see who the young guns are. In particular, I thought I'd focus on the women.

Now, at the absolute top rank of mathematics, there have been historically very few women. Think about this: between the first ICM and the first address by a woman, almost 30 years passed. Then another 60-odd years went by until Karen Uhlenbeck spoke at ICM 1990.

Fortunately, though, this is all changing. And so it is heartening indeed to see women's names pop up in this list. Even more wondrously, these young scientists are not restricted to the traditional powerhouses of mathematics - Russia, France, USA. You'll find Iranians and Spaniards and Taiwanese as well.

So here goes.

Maryam Mirzakhani: this mathematician from Iran, now based in the USA, is doubly honoured - she addresses a session in Topology as well as Dynamical Systems. Like several previous winners of the Fields Medal, she was very successful in her youth at the International Mathematics Olympiad. More recently, she was awarded the Blumenthal Award (2009), which is awarded quadrennially, and is for the best PhD thesis published in preceding four years. Her work - among others - is in the geometric structures and their deformations in all sorts of spaces, and she brings in an interdisciplinary approach to solving problems in the field, by using insights from combinatorics and mathematical physics.

Irit Dinur: is a theoretical computer scientist from Israel, where she has been working on problems in proof theory - how to establish formally that a proof is correct? In particular, by making random inspections of a formally written-out proof, is it possible to verify it? This is a deep problem in theoretical computer science, with a fundamental result (that it is, indeed, possible) established in 1992. She was able to establish a much simpler and radically new proof of this theorem in 2005, which has resulted in fresh pastures for investigation. As we know, it's not enough to solve a problem - what's better is to do so in such a way that a whole new domain of research opens up, with exciting new possibilities. Dinur has done this with aplomb. And so there's some gossip that she might win the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize (which is also awarded quadrennially at an ICM) for the applications of mathematics in the information sciences.

Sophie Morel: is from France, and her PhD thesis was an important development in the Langlands Program, solving a problem that had remained open for over twenty years. (You may recall that Laurent Lafforgue won the Fields Medal in 2002 for his contributions in this area.) This is cutting-edge work at the intersection of number theory and algebraic geometry. She was made a full professor of mathematics at Harvard last year, a notably rare and distinguished achievement made especially so when you realise that she's the first woman to be tenured in mathematics at that university! To boot, she is a skilled polyglot, conversant in French, English, Russian, German, Spanish, and now learning Korean.

Chiu-Chu Liu: is a mathematical physicist from Taiwan. She, again, is a multidisciplinarian, combining techniques from topology, differential geometry, and algebraic geometry to answer open problems in theoretical physics. In particular, her work in establishing the Marino-Vafa conjecture has been well-recognised. This has deep ramifications in string theory.

Anna Erschler: is a Russian mathematician based in France. Along with Mirzakhani, she too has two addresses at the ICM (Probability and Geometry). Her work is at the conjunction of probability and group theory.

Isabel Fernández: is a Spanish professor of mathematics at the University of Seville, and has received much attention in her native country for being the first ever Spanish woman to be invited to an ICM. Her work has been termed, loosely, soap-bubble geometry, because she investigates the geometric properties of curved objects. It is at once a classical field in mathematics, but equally cutting-edge, combining results from differential equations, complex analysis and variational calculus. Interestingly, her work has found immediate practical application in architecture, notably at the Olympic stadium in Munich, where surfaces she studied have been found to be light-weight, use little by way of materials, and are notably resilient. And, having solved one of the open major problems in the field - minimal surfaces in homogeneous spaces - the invitation to the ICM celebrates her achievement (to be sure, with her colleague Paul Mira).

Catharina Stroppel: is a German mathematician, winner of the 2007 Whitehead prize for her work in representation theory and its applications to low-dimensional topology.

Marianna Csörnyei: is Hungarian, another Whitehead prizewinner (2002), and works in geometric measure theory. "Central to her work is the analysis of viable definitions of ‘negligible’ in the context of infinite-dimensional situations, with a view to applications in non-linear geometric functional analysis. Technically difficult, the judges described her work as characterised by the ‘startling nature of many of her results’. A particularly ‘spectacular achievement’ highlighted was her proof that the three main notions of ‘negligibility’ coincide, and her revelation of delicate phenomena in the theory of Lipschitz quotients even in the finite dimensional case." (from here)

Nalini Anantharaman: is French; her work is in mathematical physics, and she attempts to answer questions about the phenomenon of dispersion: "A wave propagates in a closed cavity. It will bounce off the walls. I'm trying to understand how it will dissolve: will it remain compartmentalized, contained in a portion of the cavity or will it be dispersed throughout the cavity?" (from here) One of her major contributions is in quantum chaos, where she established some results supporting the Quantum Unique Ergodicity Conjecture.

Katrin Wendland: is German; her work is in mathematical physics, particularly in the nature of particles. Notably, she "constructed a large class of examples of mirror symmetry using orbifold methods and Kummer K3 surfaces" (from here) Her research also unfolds deep connections between non-commutative geometry and algebraic geometry, and she has many contributions in topological quantum field theories.

Dorit Aharonov: is an Israeli computer scientist. In 2005, she was profiled in Nature. One of her major achievements was to show that even in the presence of interfering noise, a quantum computer could still achieve reliable results. Because quantum computers require considerable isolation from their surroundings (the 'quantum processors' should not interact with their surroundings, or the resultant errors will rapidly degrade the computation), it was thought that these would remain theoretical curiosities. Her work in quantum error correction went a long way in establishing the domain as technologically viable. In addition, she has worked in the quantum scale problem - why do quantum effects manifest only at subatomic levels but appear to vanish at human scales? "Aharonov showed that for many noisy quantum systems, there is a level of noise above which a transition to classical behaviour is inevitable. Such transitions are much sharper than expected from other theories that predict a gradual shift away from quantum behaviour."

Hopefully, at least one of them wins the medal.

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Jun 16, 2010

The Giant’s Shoulders #24

Welcome to the twenty-fourth instalment of the Giant’s Shoulders, the monthly carnival of science and history-of-science blogging from around the planet. In this issue, there’s a bit of a preponderance of historical vignettes, which I trust you’ll find interesting.

Shall we start with a timeline of scientific discoveries, analyses and inventions? How about this – from years that end in 24 in every century? I’m missing several years, so if you’d like to fill those in, please be my guest.

I can’t think of any particular grouping in this carnival. You know, by subject and all that. It’s pretty motley. Chronological order is somewhat unsatisfying, like arranging books on your shelf in alphabetical order of title. Let us, therefore, be whimsical.

From New at LacusCurtius & Livius, we have Bill Thayer’s introduction and a link to a classic paper about how people developed effective ways to compute the heights of mountains. It’s a wide-ranging work, starting from the Ancient Greeks and working its way through Kepler and The paper is from 1929, so expect nothing on GPS in it!

Continuing with mensuration, Ethan Siegel at ScienceBlogs has a neat little piece about how to determine distances to the stars. In How Far to the Stars, he explains the principle of parallax, notes that Copernicus thought he could use it to tell distances, and then goes on to Christiaan Huygens’s idea of using luminosity to compute how far Sirius is from us.

So we are able to measure distances with excellent accuracy. But what of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle? Surely it’s impossible to measure simultaneously (to arbitrary precision) both the position and the momentum of an object? This is certainly true on the scale of the truly small, but why is it not so evident on the scale of our senses? Why does quantum mechanics explain to remarkable accuracy the weird behaviour of the minute but loses that weirdness at the macroscopic? On homunculus, Philip Ball presents Big Quantum, where he talks about this explanatory lacuna in the transition between the very small and the large. It’s all due to decoherence!

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How about some pseudoscience? Alchemy has had a bad rap, and yet it provided the foundations for chemistry. Via Thony C., we have Lawrence Principe and the Rehabilitation of Alchemy – another lecture in Utrecht posted at Heterodoxology.

For another example of the genre, we have Caroline Rance at The Quack Doctor with an interesting little piece about one type of alternative medicine – uroscopy. This is the use of urine’s colour, consistency, taste and smell as a diagnostic tool. By the 19th century, professional medics had discounted this as quackery, but common people continued to frequent piss-doctors. In Cameron the Piss-Prophet, we learn how one such worthy was hoist by his own petard.

From one aspect of quackery, we move on to another. In 1726, a woman named Mary Toft (or Tofts) was a sensation in England for having allegedly given birth to rabbits.

Hogarth's Cunicularii (source: Tate Britain, Hogarth Exhibition 2007)

She had supporters and deriders in equal measure; scientists argued both in her favour (e.g. a medical doctor, John Maubray) and against (Sir Richard Manningham, a male midwife). William Hogarth’s Cunicularii at the Wellcome Library Item of the Month (besides analysing some lovely etchings by the great artist) raises a subtle question.

Leaving quackery, we ponder another form of obfuscation. Via Thony C. we have an article titled “Follies of the present day”: Scriptural Geology from 1817 to 1857 by J.M. Lynch at A Simple Prop. Who were scriptural geologists? These were scientists who tried somehow to unify vast geological time with their faith in the Bible’s six days of creation. Note that these people did not believe (pace Ussher) that the Universe was formed in 4004 BC.

Why did these Christian scientists not pay closer attention to James Hutton? In 1785, he had published an article Concerning the System of the Earth, Its Duration, and Stability in which he began the study of deep geological time. Via Thony C., we have John F. Ptak’s Raising Greatness: James Hutton’s Deep View of Time, 1795 posted at Ptak Science Books talking about Hutton’s remarkable intuition, as he saw the entirety of Earth’s history explained in the sloping red sandstone at Siccar Point.

While on the subject of deep time, a fossil of the Archaeopteryx was first discovered in 1861. Since then palaeontologists have argued whether this transitional creature (between dinosaurs and true birds) was capable of flight. Ed Yong presents First Birds Were Poor Fliers at the Discover Magazine Blog. There were some reasons to believe that the beast could fly but also good reasons why not.

Fossils and da Vinci - who would have thunk it? Via Thony C., we have Brian Switek's Leonardo da Vinci - Palaeontology Pioneer at the Smithsonian Magazine's blog.

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Dorset Ancestors have a biography of Francis Glisson, a native of that English county, who went on to great success as a doctor in 17th century London. When he heard of a new debilitating disease among children of Dorset, he studied it carefully and concluded that this bone-deformative condition (which we know as ‘rickets’) was caused by malnutrition.

A sesquicentennial after Glisson plied his investigative mind, another Englishman began to consider the various causes of deafness in people. As a diagnostic tool, John Harrison Curtis invented the Cephaloscope, which is described in Jaipreet Virdi’s post The Cephaloscope on From the Hands of Quacks.

John Harrison Curtis also insisted that aurists – students of auditory illnesses – should also be attached to medical hospitals. Jaipreet Virdi’s related post The London Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb tells this story.

From illnesses of the body, we segue to a illness of the mind. The dreaded African disease, sleeping sickness, when in an advanced stage, often resulted in violent mania. Was this true insanity on the part of the natives, or just a manifestation of a fear of isolation in a camp? From Sleeping Sickness and Lunacy at the Colonial Psychiatry Hub, we learn that much documentation of the effects of sleeping sickness on the local population is available from the British staffers of the Colonial Office (Uganda).

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Just for variety, here’s something to watch rather than to read. Via Thony C., we have Lens on Leeuwenhoek: Videos about his life, times, and accomplishments posted at Lens on Leeuwenhoek.

This video is an overview of the life, times, and accomplishments of Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), the Dutch scientist who used hand-made single-lens microscopes to become the first human to see protozoa, bacteria, sperm, and red blood cells, among many other things.

And although that video’s only 7 minutes long, it promises more riches to come. Can there be any more to van Leeuwenhoek, then? Indeed there can, and Thony C. presents Lego-nhoek? posted at Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Centraal.

van Leeuwenhoek, of course, was a contemporary, competitor and Royal Society colleague of that polymath Robert Hooke. I found several blogs on this brilliant Englishman, and planned to chuck them in here, but closer scrutiny revealed that at least one of those pieces was a copy of a Wikipedia article. I hope this is not a similar copy: Leland Velazquez discusses the Physics of Bungee Jumping. Hooke’s work on elasticity leading to his eponymous law is the underpinning of this extreme sport.

If Robert Hooke is around, Christopher Wren can’t be far behind. Another brilliantly multifaceted man, Wren involved himself in astronomy, mathematics, architecture, art, and – we learn from Christopher Wren and the Bees by Gene Kritsky at Wonders & Marvels – beekeeping. Why is this scientifically relevant? He also developed the transparent beehive that was suitable for the scientific observation of bee behaviour.

The bees were able to move between the various layers of the hive, and glass panels set into the structure allowed an observer to see the honey cascading down inside it. Although Wren’s construction had not been an immediate success (due to a failure to realise that bees worked downwards), it offered the prospect of an ever-increasing stock of bees and honey within the same hive. [from here]

Speaking of polymaths, there was Florence Fenwick Miller in the 19th century. She was a suffragette, a journalist, an educator, and a qualified medical doctor. From Peacay at the absolutely ravishing BibliOdyssey, we have An Atlas of Anatomy.

From Peacay at BibliOdyssey again, we have Fungis Danicis, a lovely set of illustrations of fungi studied by a Danish lawyer-turned-botanist named Theodor Holmskjold in the 18th century. This worthy actually identified over fifty new species during two years of observation in the countryside near Aarhus.

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Now for some controversy! When scientists without training in history try to develop works in the history of science, clearly feathers are ruffled.  Via Thony C., we have Renaissance Art or Neuroanatomy? Part 1 and part 2, posted by Darin at PACHSmörgåsbord. It appears that there have been a series of papers over the past 20 years by various scientists trying to find hidden anatomically precise messages in Michelangelo’s art.

Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam

R. Donald Fields wrote up a guest blog at Scientific American recently that discusses the oeuvre; as it turns out, none of the scientists involved is a trained historian. As the rebuttal at PACHSmörgåsbord makes clear, this is dangerous practice:

Why does this matter? Because such articles attract the attention of editors and contributors at places like Scientific American. These contributors then post a redaction of the article on the website, where the post becomes one of the most popular. Such redactions misrepresent the history of science, suggest that anybody can write the history of science, and deny that historians of science have a discrete expertise. That’s why it matters.

But just to show that not all scientific speculation on art is ill-founded, check out this interesting bit of detective work by a bunch of astronomers at Texas State University. Via Thony C., we have a post by Roger Sinnott on Sky And Telescope titled Walt Whitman’s Meteor-Procession, we learn about the great poet’s imagery (“the strange huge meteor-procession" that went "shooting over our heads" with "its balls of unearthly light”) and an interesting astronomical phenomenon.

I’m not sure if this next piece fits within the purview of our Carnival (as it may be more aligned to sociology) but I think it relates to a seminal work of behavioural psychology, so perhaps I can present it? Christopher Greene’s Clarks’ Black-White Doll Experiment Replicated at Advances in the History of Psychology blog discusses an even more controversial subject than that in the preceding paragraph, and highlights its most recent replication under the aegis of CNN (full report here in PDF).

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On to more jolly subjects. Remember Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation? It is 50 years since the invention of the (optical) laser. Via Thony C., we have Happy Birthday! posted by Matt Springer at Built on Facts.

Another anniversary is that of Vannevar Bush’s visionary piece sixty-five years ago in the Atlantic Review about associative links in information, which one can easily see as an early precursor to hypertext and all that. Via gg, we have Simon Harper’s review ‘As We May Think’ at 65 from his blog Thinking Out Loud.

In the 19th century, by a gradual process of socialisation, the scientific and professional communities in the USA began to differentiate themselves. Will Thomas posts Paul Lucier on ‘Professionals’ and ‘Scientists’ in 19th century America at the Ether Wave Propaganda blog.

We end on a luminous, numinous note. What links a certain 1980s teen film, a song by John Parr, the Chinese sea-goddess Mazu, and – wait for it – ionised air? In St Elmo’s Fire, Captain Skellet of A Schooner of Science explains the whys and the hows of the gorgeous blue glow that appears on the tips of masts on sailing ships.

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[And there you have it. Thanks for stopping by. I hope this encourages  you to write up your own pieces on science and its history and philosophy. Do consider submitting your blog article to the next edition of the giant's shoulders at The Dispersal of Darwin. You can use the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the blog carnival index page.]

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