October 04, 2017 Wednesday
Bedtime Story
At Princeton, Haskell Encounters
Mind you, you must not mistake this
Princeton University that Haskell Curry joined with the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton as it was still three years too soon before it would get
established.
You would recall, I hope, my elaborate
bedtime story on the founding of the IAS thanks to the organizing talent of
Abraham Flexner and funding from the Fulds brother and sister.
In 1927 while at the Princeton University
Haskell Curry came across a paper written by Moses Schönfinkel on combinatory
logic.
If you are wondering what on earth is
combinatory logic, I would not be surprised.
All I can request is to ask for your patience
as combinatory logic is the whole reason that we took the great diversion from
lambda calculus.
Now Moses Schönfinkel like Haskell too was
a logician and mathematician who was born 11 years before Haskell did, but only
several thousands of kilometers east of him.
To be more accurate, Schönfinkel was born
in 1889 in Ekaterinoslav (named after the Russian Empress Catherine the Great)
in what was then the Russian Empire.
Currently the city lies in Ukraine and for
obvious reason has now been renamed as Dnipro as it lies on the banks of
Dnieper River.
Moses studied mathematics at the Odessa
University under another dedicated mathematician Samuil Shatunovsky.
Shatunovsky was generation ahead of both
Schönfinkel and Curry and was born way back in 1859 to an extremely poor Jewish
family.
Jewish families were generally kept
isolated in the Russian Empire which led to their being poor because of lack of
opportunities.
Shatunovsky attended many technical
universities but he could develop no interest in engineering for his first and
last love was pure mathematics.
He was so poor that he could not complete
any university degree even after trying at several places.
The reason being that each time he took a
course, he ran out of money to pay for his tuition.
Obviously the Russian Empire did not practice
socialism like the Soviet Union did or at least aspired to.
This is an extreme kind of poverty that I
have never had to face in my life thanks to my wealthy parents.
Au contraire I had the luxury to study and
experiment (quite literally in my case) till quite late in my life.
I must be thankful to my fortune just for
that itself.
Make no mistake mon ami, it is pure random
luck and good fortune and not any divine benevolence that I got what I did and
missed what I did not.
Each good meal that I eat, each bedtime
sleep that I get, each shower that I get to have and each day that I stay
healthy and alive are outcomes of billions of random chance events for this
universe in general is as hostile to life as superstition and religion are to
reason and science.
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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