May
12, 2017 Friday
Bedtime
Story
Letter Numbered XLIII and Dated June 7, 1742
It
was eventually at this Potsdam Conference that The Big Three agreed in
principal to the proposal of the Soviet Union concerning the transfer of the
city of Königsberg and the area surrounding it.
Mind
you mon ami, the city was never formally transferred to the Soviet Union under
the international law; the city along with the oblast (region or district) was
merely placed under Soviet administration.
After
the war, Soviet Union went on to become such a great military superpower that
no country, not even the United States dared to question the status of any
landmass east of West Germany.
It
would now be a part of geographical sobriquet - the Eastern Bloc confined
behind the Iron Curtain.
The
Soviet Union had converted all the countries of the Eastern Europe into its
satellite nations within the Eastern Bloc that included Poland, Bulgaria,
Czechoslovakia, Romania, Albania and even East Germany.
Till
1991, Königsberg fitted very well within the boundaries of the mighty Soviet
Union.
It
was only following the collapse of the Soviet Union when all its satellite
countries broke free (in 1991) did Königsberg (or rather the Kaliningrad
oblast) end up in getting isolated and becoming an exclave, now separated
geographically from the rest of Russia.
Christian
Goldbach would know nothing of all this for he was born almost 250 years before
all this would happen.
The
political boundaries were very different then but the apes being apes and
Europeans being Europeans, they always fought and killed each other, religion
then being as big a motivator for wars as was the territories.
Goldbach
was a true academician and an intellectual who also loved to travel.
After
his studies, he travelled all over Europe to finally return and settle as a
professor of mathematics at the then newly opened St Petersburg Academy of
Sciences in 1725.
He
met and corresponded with the best mathematicians of his times including
Leibniz, Euler and Bernoulli.
Many
of the correspondences of these great minds have been preserved thanks to the
enlightened Western civilization.
In
a letter numbered XLIII and dated June 7, 1742 Goldbach wrote to Euler
proposing a conjecture which essentially is a kind of hunch:
Every
integer which can be written as the sum of two primes, can also be written as
the sum of as many primes as one wishes, until all terms are units.
Then
Goldbach makes a second entry in the sideline of the letter:
Every
integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of three primes.
In
Goldbach’s times 1 was considered a prime, a notion that has been abandoned
now.
We
shall continue with the Euler-Goldbach correspondence in the nights to come.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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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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