January 19, 2018 Friday
Bedtime Story
The Story of Luigi Menabrea
Luigi Menabrea was a scholarly kind of a
young man who did his engineering from University of Turin and went on to do
his PhD in mathematics.
Following his education he joined the army
as officer of engineers.
The European nations were constantly at war
with each other either locally or more frequently abroad vying for colonial
supremacy with each other.
This ensured that a major chunk of
resources of government income would be constantly poured into the army.
This ensured a “safe” career in the army,
safe at least from financial point of view; I doubt if this safety factor was
applicable to limbs or bodies.
Menabrea was also employed as a professor
of mechanics and construction both at the military academy and the University
of Turin.
It was somewhere during this period of
being a fresh professor and officer in the army that he found himself taking
notes during the lecture that was being delivered by Babbage in Turin.
Little did Babbage know and perhaps
Menabrea himself never dreamt that some day in future he would go on to become
the 7th prime minister of Italy.
This would only happen 25 years later but
meanwhile soon after the lecture Menabrea collated his notes and published a
beautiful paper in French based on his notes.
The paper as titled:
Sketch of The Analytical Engine Invented by
Charles Babbage
It is a beautiful paper and Ada was so
impressed by it that she decided to translate it from French to English.
She discussed this idea of translation with
Babbage (when in London, Ada lived just a mile apart from Babbage) who asked
her to write her own account of the analytical engine.
This idea had never struck her on her own
but what she eventually decided to do early following year was to have a go at
both.
She not only translated the magnificent
paper of Menabrea from French to English but also followed it up with profusely
extensive notes of her own that provided as much insight to the idea of the
engine as that of the original author.
I shall first quote a few passages from the
paper published by Luigi Menabrea in the journal Bibliotheque Universelle de
Geneve October 1842 Issue number 82 to demonstrate how well understood was
Babbage by this unknown army officer then.
They may not necessarily be in any order or
in continuation as I only wish to present to you the salient ideas grasped by
the officer keenly listening and noting down points in Turin.
“Those labors which belong to various
branches of the mathematical sciences, although on first consideration they
seem to be the exclusive province of intellect, may, nevertheless be divided
into two distinct sections; one of which may be called the mechanical, because
it is subjected to precise and invariable laws, that are capable of being
expressed by means of the operations of the matter; while the other; demanding
the intervention of reasoning, belongs more specially to the domain of the
understanding.
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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