June 21, 2018 Thursday
Bedtime Story
Working Style of Lagrange
As I was telling last night, Lagrange had become pretty close to the King of Prussia Fredrick II who is well known for introducing the process of Enlightenment of the Seventeenth Century Prussia and also making it the leading military power of Europe.
Lagrange was greatly influenced by some of the ideas of Frederick the Great and tried to implement upon them, one of which was approaching the human body in terms of a purely mechanical device and testing its endurance without a break.
For this before going to bed, every night Lagrange would set himself the task for the next day in writing and when he would complete a paper on any subject he would make a written analysis of it to look for its deficiencies.
Before writing any paper, Lagrange always thought deep, hard and to its completion so that once when he would embark on writing it down he would do so in one go without a single erasure or correction.
This is quite remarkable considering how much corrections I have to continuously make while writing down my bedtime stories which are neither novel nor original.
The work that Lagrange did in Berlin in his treatise Mécanique analytique was essentially a retake or reformulation of the Newtonian classical mechanics.
Now what was the key difference between the mechanics of Newton and Lagrange?
Now both of them took to the analysis of moving objects in the middle world, such as movement of projectiles, pendulum, springs, string vibrations and so on.
Newtonian mechanics, if you recall from High School days that is largely taught, deals with vector quantities of motion such as velocities, accelerations, force, momenta and both Newton and Euler contributed greatly to its mathematical formulations.
Hence Newtonian mechanics is also known as vectorial mechanics.
The mathematics that Lagrange developed to tackle the same problems of defining the position and speed of moving bodies in our Middle world largely involved scalar quantities.
Now you would recall the definition and the difference between a scalar and a vector quantity.
A scalar quantity is a physical quantity that can be described by a single element of a number field such as a real number accompanied with a unit of measurement.
Note that I use the word number field and not number line.
A mathematical field is a set on which the operation such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are defined and so is their behavior when applied to the rational and real numbers.
It is the fundamental algebraic structure on which the entire edifice of mathematics has been built up.
The common mathematical fields that are well established are the field of rational numbers (represented by
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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