October 08, 2017 Sunday
Bedtime Story
End of Herbert Backe and Moses
After Herbert Backe was arrested by the
allied forces in May of 1945 he felt quite comfortable and at ease with them.
It came as a relief that he was a prisoner
of war of the Americans.
He even had a notion that he would be taken
directly to General Dwight D. Eisenhower and would be recruited to solve the
food problem that was quite prevalent during those war days.
But by 1947 he still remained an allied
prisoner and was rigorously interrogated during the Nuremberg Trials.
I am not sure exactly what happened, but
knowing Stalin and the Soviets, I am sure they would have demanded of Americans
that he be transferred to Soviet Union where he would be “tried” for his crimes
against humanity.
After all, the Slavic population of the
Soviet Union faced the maximum casualties under the onslaught of Backe’s Hunger
Plan.
Fearing that he might be deported to Soviet
Union and face Soviet “trial”, on April 6, 1947 Herbert Backe hung himself in
his cell.
So that was how Herbert Backe, the man who
starved millions, met his hand.
One of the victims of this ruthless Hunger
Plan of Backe and Riecke was the mathematician and logician Moses Schönfinkel.
Schönfinkel died of hunger and poverty
sometime in 1942 in the cold and war-torn Moscow.
His mathematical papers were burnt up by
his neighbors for heating.
The paper or rather that the idea that
Schönfinkel laid out to David Hilbert group in 1920 was totally concerned with
logic and foundations of mathematics.
It had not even remotely anything to do
either with lambda calculus or functional programming languages.
Computer science did not even exist then.
You would recall that lambda calculus is
essentially about functions.
But so is algebra and analysis/calculus.
The difference is that whereas algebra and
analysis consist of equalities or equations, lambda calculus consists of
values.
We had discussed about input and output
values earlier.
When we discuss about combinatory logic, I
need to explain to you the concept of variables in mathematical logic.
Now in mathematics, particularly in
mathematical logic, formal languages and computer science there exists this
concept of free variables and bound variables.
Free variable is a variable in an
expression that specifies where a substitution can take place.
A bound variable, on the other hand, is a
variable that was previously free but now has been bound to a specific value or
a set of values.
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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