October 06, 2017 Friday
Bedtime Story
Eventually Shatunovsky went on to become a
professor and spent his entire life at the University.
So it was under this natural mathematician
that Moses Schönfinkel got his initial training in mathematics at Odessa
University.
Shatunovsky had also worked on foundations
of mathematics and that too must have had some impact on the young Moses.
After spending his early years in Odessa
under Shatunovsky, Schönfinkel moved to University of Göttingen.
Schönfinkel spent ten years in Göttingen
from 1914 to 1924 where he went on to become a member of David Hilbert’s group.
This was the group of elite mathematicians
who not only did advanced mathematics but also pondered over the philosophy of
mathematics and weaknesses in its foundations.
I mean they were not your average
mathematicians who learn mathematics and then teach mathematics to students
to get through exams or arrive at quick solutions to mathematical problems.
That is the kind of image we have in
general of mathematicians.
But David Hilbert and his group were the
elite.
They not only attacked the unsolved
problems but pondered deeply over the weaknesses that existed then in mathematics
particularly in terms of paradoxes that mathematics is capable of generating.
On December 7 of 1920 when he was 31 Schönfinkel
gave a talk to the group where he first gave a sketch of the concept of
combinatory logic.
For some unknown reasons he himself never
published this work that he discussed in this particular talk.
But someone who heard the talk that day and
who was in this group did.
Four years later, in 1924, Heinrich Behmann
compiled the idea of this new subject and published it.
Haskell Curry would later following the
footsteps of Schönfinkel arrive in Gottingen and work with Heinrich Behmann who
was well versed with the concepts of combinatory logic.
The paper was published in German in
Mathematische Annalen “Űber die Bausteine der Mathematischen Logik”.
This paper translated into English as “On
the building blocks of mathematical logic”.
It was this paper that fell into the hands
of Haskell Curry at the Princeton University in 1927.
By 1927 when Curry was reading his paper,
Schönfinkel was not only back in Moscow but had also become mentally ill and
had to be placed in sanatorium.
From then on it was downhill all the way
both intellectually and financially.
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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