July 20, 2019 Saturday
Bedtime Story
1950 - the Year International Congress of Mathematics Took Place First Time in the United States
The 1900 International Congress of
Mathematics (ICM) was not held at Princeton but at Paris, Sorbonne where David
Hilbert had given his famous lecture and posed to mathematicians those famous
23 unsolved problems.
The International Congress of Mathematics
is organized by the International Mathematical Union once every four years with
the first one taking place in Zurich in 1897.
The idea of such gathering was first
proposed by Felix Klein and Georg Cantor one being from the Prussian Empire and
the other being of Russian Empire origin by birth.
Europe’s dominance in world mathematics and
sciences can be reckoned from the fact that not until 1924 did the venue of the
Congress shift to North America which much to your surprise wasn’t Princeton or
IAS but Toronto, Canada.
The first ICM that was held in the United
States only took place after the War (in 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts an
agricultural village that incidentally but aptly was named in honor of
university in Cambridge, England that my father used to often speak about in my
childhood) when it was clear to everyone that all the Empires of European nations
would cease to exist and the United States was all set to become the new world
power (along with Soviet Union but it always remained an enigmatic and
mysterious power).
Cambridge is America’s academic and
intellectual center with the distinction of having Harvard University,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Hult Business School in its confines.
Even more interesting is the fact that of
the world’s 780 Nobel Prize winners at least 129 of them have at some time or
the other been affiliated with the universities at Cambridge.
In a study conducted by Bay Area Center for
Voting Research (BACVR) in 2005 Cambridge was ranked as the 8th most
liberal city of the United States with Detroit ranking first and Baltimore
where I happened to live ranking 14th (and it actually felt that
way).
All the liberal cities of America are
characterized by large African American populations with the most conservative
having extremely low African Americans in them.
It would not come as a surprise then that
the most conservative city of the United States (as per the BACVR study)
happened to be Provo in the state of Utah just 43 miles south of Salt Lake City
which is the land of Mormons.
So with the Europe being the powerhouse of
scientific research and mathematics Major Bowditch after the end of the Civil
War in 1868 moved to Paris to work under the famous Claude Bernard at the
University of Paris or the Sorbonne.
Those days the science of physiology was
not even at its infancy (and perhaps yet to be truly born in any meaningful way)
and therefore Claude Bernard had very little resources at hand to work
upon.
Help (and money) came to Bernard through
his dowry when he married Marie Francoise “Fanny” Martin (who ironically
opposed his vivisection experiments on animals and who had once shouted at him
as he experimented on dogs without any anesthesia “Tais-toi, pauvre bête!”
{Shut up, you poor beast!}).
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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