November 04, 2016 Friday
Bedtime Story
John Eckert
John Eckert
I am quite certain that most of present day computer engineers
would have never have heard about John Eckert.
Just as much as today’s doctors have very little understanding of the
pioneers of evidence based medicine which is of very resent origin.
Most of us would be totally unaware of the names and the works of
men like Abraham Flexner, David Eddy (having a remarkable dual feat of being
both a medical doctor and a mathematician), Alvan Feinstein and of course
Archie Cochrane.
Eckert was one of those rare geniuses who was born rich and driven
to school in a chauffeur driven car in 1920s in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
His parents like most parents tend to, initially pushed him into
business school but Eckert got himself transferred to Penn’s Moore School of
Electrical Engineering.
He knew he had made the right choice when at the age of 21 (in
1940) he filed his first patent.
At the Moore school, he worked on 2 projects.
Radar and its improvement was one.
The other was on the differential analyzer.
What on earth is this differential analyzer?
Very smart, rare and intelligent men (I am talking about seriously
perspicacious rare men) have been fascinated with differential equations since
ages.
Differential equations as we are taught in schools relates a
function (any physical quantity such as heat, trajectory etc.) with its
derivative or derivatives (that describes rate of change of a parameter or
parameters such as temperature, position, velocity and so on, on which the
function depends upon).
A differential equation that relates a function to one variable
derivative is called an ordinary differential equation.
On the other hand, when a function is dependent on more than one
variable derivatives, such an equation is famously known as partial
differential equation.
Pure mathematicians study differential equations and look for its
solutions for no good reason.
In fact, the moment a differential equation ends up describing
something physical about the universe, they tend to cease working on it letting
it be taken over by mathematical physicists.
Differential equations differ from common algebraic equations in
following ways:
Their solutions are often obscure.
Whether their solutions are unique or not
Whether they are even solvable or not is of great interest.
Example being the Peano existence theorem first published in 1886
by Giuseppe Peano and Augustin-Luis Cauchy.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night and my fellow cousin ape.
Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an IIT graduate and
a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, may I
suggest this large collection of Kids Songs:
No comments:
Post a Comment