December 23, 2016 Friday
Bedtime Story
“On the Decomposition of Point Sets into Respectively Congruent
Parts” by Banach and Tarski (1924)
It was not that Tarski wanted to leave Poland; for just as he was
set to leave for the conference a vacancy had been created with the demise of
Leśniewski that would have gone to him.
Inadvertently, his wife and children along with his entire
extended family were left behind as the invasion of Poland was sudden and
unexpected.
Almost his entire extended family was murdered and wiped out of
existence by the efficient German killing machinery.
For all the personal loss that befell upon Tarski, there was one
huge yield for him in the professional sense.
Fate was delivering him to the most impregnable and apt place
where his talent would be recognized and nurtured.
Almost immediately on arriving into America, Tarski took up a
position at Harvard and later in 1942, thanks to a grant through the Guggenheim
Fellowship, he got a chance to be at the holiest grail of mathematics: the
Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton.
That too at the time when it was studded with luminaries that had
set the world of science on fire.
Over there, once again he encountered the great logician Kurt
Gödel (At the end of each day, Einstein would walk back with Gödel to their
respective homes).
Soon after his short stay at the IAS, he got a position at the
Mathematics Department of University of California, Berkley which he held on
till the very end.
Tarski met with phenomenal success in America in almost every way
a mathematician can hope to achieve, being acknowledged as a great and
passionate teacher, a charismatic speaker and publishing masterly papers in
mathematics, logic and formalized languages.
He went on to be elected to the United States National Academy of
Sciences, the British Academy and even the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts
and Sciences.
Yet, for all his success and achievements in America, the work for
which he is most renowned came in his earliest days in his homeland.
It was his first paper on set theory that he wrote with Stephan
Banach (University of Lwów) in 1924 when in Warsaw, Poland.
The paper was published in the journal Fundamenta Mathematicae and was titled:
“On the Decomposition of Point Sets into Respectively Congruent
Parts”.
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 electronic
engineer 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, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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