October 03, 2017 Tuesday
Bedtime Story
Haskell Curry Arrives on Spaceship Earth in 1900
Haskell Curry is a very interesting
mathematician for one very simple reason.
He has three programming languages named
after him – Haskell, Brook and Curry.
There is also a technique called currying
that has been named after him.
It is not relevant to our storyline here
but as I have used the word, I might as well elaborate just a little bit on it.
Currying is a technique that allows working
with functions that can take in multiple arguments and then use them in places
where functions can take in one argument.
Since I am not a mathematician, I cannot
explain in great detail its exact use and applications, but suffice it is to
say that computer scientists use it at least theoretically in their work.
It is interesting to note that Haskell
Curry was born in 1900 in Millis, Massachusetts just when the problem on the Foundations
of Mathematics was being attacked from all sides, mainly by great minds in West
Europe and Britain.
Both his parents ran a private school for
elocution.
You may not know what on earth elocution
means.
Well, elocution can be considered a branch
of linguistics that studies pronunciation, grammar, style and tone.
This means that somewhere in Curry’s
background there was language associated, though I am certain his parents would
have ever imagined their little boy to develop not one but three different
languages.
Just as he attained the age of 16, he
joined Harvard University to study medicine.
Remarkably enough, and I do not know how to
explain it, when he did graduate from Harvard in 1920, he came out as a
mathematician and not a medical doctor.
Following that he spent two years at the
MIT studying electrical engineering following which he returned to Harvard to
pursue physics this time.
Thankfully he did not shift gears mid way
and got his masters in physics in 1924.
It was somewhere around this time that he
got introduced to Principia Mathematica that ignited the spark towards
mathematical logic inside him.
You might not recall but fortunately I do
very well, that while writing on Principia I had fleetingly mentioned that the
book is so highly symbolic with absolutely bizarre notations that very few men
in this world have actually read and understood this book.
Haskell Curry was one of those rare breed.
For some unknown reason, the way I am drawn
to writing bedtime stories, Curry kept on getting drawn towards mathematical
logic.
Soon in 1927 he got a position of
instructor at the Princeton University and moved over there from Harvard.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
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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