March 17, 2018 Saturday
Bedtime Story
European Imperialism Funded European Science and Mathematics
It was companies like these, rather than
the monarchs or queens, who led the initial colonial expeditions to faraway
lands in both the Asia and the Americas.
Among such limited liability joint stock
companies, the most powerful, wealthy and perhaps the most notorious of them as
we all know was the English (and later British) East India Company.
It was companies like these that funded by
shares sold in their trading exchanges such as the Amsterdam Stock Exchanges sent
their ships to set sail blindly to far away continents and on landing would
declare, “This land is ours”, the rights of the natives be damned!
That is exactly how the Madras Presidency
started when merchants from this famous joint stock company landed in the
village of Madraspatnam.
You would expect that the first thing that
the invaders would do is to seek out the ruler and establish contact with him.
No, not these guys; The very first thing
they did on landing was to construct an
impregnable fort and call it the Agency of Fort St. George.
It was such economic and colonial
imperialism that was funding men like Christiaan Huygens who in turn, like a
positive feed-back loop, were making scientific discoveries and coming out with
gadgets such as microscopes, telescopes, firing weapons, pendulum clock and what
not that decided who had the edge in the battle fields.
What most of us don’t wish to care and know
that behind all these gadgets, right from microscopes to computers, lie
mathematics which in its infancy is so abstract and detached from real world
that one is often tempted to ask the question, ‘Why do mathematicians even
bother?’
But Huygens certainly did bother.
For after Saint-Vincent (1647), he too gave
a hard look at the problem of rectangular hyperbola or the area below the
hyperbolic curve drawn on an x-y axis in 1661.
Huygens very intentionally looked at the
area under the rectangular hyperbola yx = 1 and the logarithm.
What he found was that the area of the
rectangular hyperbola from point 1 on the x axis to point e in equal to 1.
This is that weird property of the number e
that makes it the base of natural logarithms.
Huygens in that very year came out with a
curve that he defined as “algorithmic” that was a product of the function
y = kax.
In modern mathematics this curve is known
as exponential function which is stated in the form f(x) = bx
Where the input variable x occurs as an
exponent.
Exponential functions are unique in that
the growth rate of such a function (which essentially means its derivative) is
directly proportional to the value of the function.
The constant of proportionality of this
relationship is the natural logarithm of base b.
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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