September 21, 2018 Friday
Bedtime Story
'The Fable of the Bees' and the Mathematician of King's College, Cambridge
We shall continue tonight with the poem
‘The Grumbling Hive’ published way back in 1714.
The bees have now given up their vices and
become chaste and most importantly frugal and thrifty, the virtues I was
extolling to no end just a couple of nights ago.
“That, to avoid Extravagance,
They flew into a hollow tree,
Blest with Content and Honesty.”
The poem then ends in a famous phrase:
“Bare virtue can’t make nations live
In Splendor; they, that would revive,
A Golden Age, must be as free,
For Acorns, as for Honesty”
This poem when written was largely ignored and
lay in slumber for more than two centuries when somewhere in 1930s it was
revived by then a little known mathematician (BA in mathematics from King’s
College, Cambridge) and a clerk in the India Office in London.
The functioning of this India Office as the
name suggests was concerned with the administration of the provinces of British
India which included not merely the subcontinent but Aden as well.
This office was set up in 1858 in London
and this event represented the transfer of the provinces of the Indian
subcontinent from the East India Company to the United Kingdom Government
through the Government of India Act, 1858.
The Act itself was precipitated by the
famous Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 which also called for the liquidation of the
British East India Company which until then had been ruling British India under
the auspices of the Parliament.
The clerk job at this India office in
London proved to be a terrible bore for this mathematician who eventually
resigned from this clerk position and returned back to Cambridge.
This mathematician in spite of holding the
position of lecturer at the Cambridge made his primary income through private
tutoring of pupils.
While to most human apes mathematics and
its pursuit is a useless endeavor and yet I have always emphasized that it is a
very useful subject to master in.
Just like a capable physician will
generally not go hungry even when left to fend all for himself (physicians have
even been known to practice their trade in prisons under the condition of incarcerations),
the same is true for a mathematician worth his salt; he will always find use of
his knowledge/problem solving skills in aiding young minds struggling with
mathematics in schools and colleges.
This mathematician went on to become the
editor of ‘The Economic Journal’, then appointed to the Royal Commission on
Indian currency and Finance and eventually by 1915 was back with the government
in the Treasury but this time in an enviable position much higher than clerk.
We shall continue on with the story of this
clerk and mathematician in the nights to come.
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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