January 10, 2018 Wednesday
Bedtime Story
Mary Somerville Collects Mathematics Books
One of the books purchased by Somerville
was that by Italian mathematician and astronomer Joseph-Louis Lagrange.
Lagrange had made tremendous contributions
to both mathematics and physics and the list of concepts and things that have
been named after him is seriously long.
Elements of Algebra (1770) by the great Leonhard
Euler which is one of the earliest books that puts forward algebra in the
notation that we would recognize in its present form.
Figure of the Earth by French mathematician
and geophysicist Alexis Clairaut (a child prodigy who started learning calculus
at the age of 10).
Application of Analysis to Geometry by
French mathematician Gaspard Monge who is the father of both descriptive
geometry and differential geometry
Besides all this, Mary Somerville had
translated some of the works of Laplace.
If you note, almost all the authors are
from the continent and Mary Somerville strongly believed that Britain was
lagging behind the continent in mathematical science.
The reason for that was perhaps that
mathematicians in the island nation had developed resistance in taking up
calculus because of the infamous and long lasting Leibniz-Newton calculus
controversy.
Calculus finally became acceptable in
Britain once the three great mathematicians of Britain namely Charles Babbage,
John Herschel and John Peacock jointly translated and published the work of
Sylvestre Francois Lacroix in 1816.
It essentially meant that Britain had
accepted the superiority of mathematical contributions coming from the
continent, chiefly from their arch rival France.
You will surely know by now that these two
powers then were jostling and elbowing each other for colonial supremacy is
almost all the continents including North America.
If you end up thinking that all this
strange mathematics-loving lady did was purchase insane books for her library,
you would be most mistaken.
She actually conducted physical experiments
to study the relationship between light and magnetism and published it as a
paper titled “The magnetic properties of the violet rays of the solar spectrum”
in the Proceedings of Royal Society.
This would be the first of her several
papers.
Her next feat in writing would bring her
great fame.
As I had said, England was then lagging
behind the continent both in mathematics and science as most of the advancements
were coming through the great minds of the continent.
One of the greatest names in the continent
was Pierre-Simon Laplace and his five-volume treatise on celestial mechanics:
Traité de mécanique céleste.
These five volumes were published over
almost three decades starting from 1798 to 1825.
The American Quarterly Review Journal in
its June 1829 issue had the following to say about it:
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.
Advertisements
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:
No comments:
Post a Comment