Princess of Parallelograms
Check out this contest at the previously-mentioned Inkling!
I desperately want a poster of Lady Lovelace, which is sufficiently geeky I think I should win by default. I've been a fan of Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, Victorian mathematician and THE FIRST proto-computer programmer prior even to the complete construction of a computer, (and incidentally, daughter of bad-boy poet Lord Byron) ever since I read Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach about 15 years ago. My opinion of her was confirmed by reading a biography of Charles Babbage (The Difference Engine by Doron Swade) and his analytical engine, one of the earliest mechanical(!) general-purpose computers. Plus, amongst her teachers, she counts (no pun intended) Mary Somerville (1780-1872, mathematician, astronomer, writer, polymath, responsible amongst other things for bringing Laplace to the English-speaking world, a immeasurably important advancement in the history of physics). How cool is that?
And what was the first computer programme? An algorithm for generating Bernoulli numbers, no less! No mean feat... those Bernouilli's -everyone's favorite mathematical family empire... there were eight of them- didn't mess around. Though this (Jakob) was not the Bernoulli responsible for Bernoulli's equation... that was his nephew Daniel.
This has lead to an interesting random walk through cyberspace, where I've found The Mathematics Genealogy Project! This is cool because I've been told that my scientific lineage leads back through a series of so-and-so trained by such-and-such to Sir Isaac Newton himself. I didn't know there were scholars of "mathematical genealogy"... now I can see if I can trace my "genealogy"... at least as long as physicists count to the historians of math. Unfortunately, the database cites one student for Newton (Cotes), who in turn had a single student (Smith) for whom they list no students, so I'm at a dead end. I shall have to try going back in time, rather than forward.
See? Doesn't this justify why I should win this contest?
[On a not-particularly-related note, I'm finding the previous post illuminating, as clearly several people I do not know have stumbled upon this blog, since yesterday. Why, I wonder? They may have stumbled upon it earlier but they've visited since yesterday]
I desperately want a poster of Lady Lovelace, which is sufficiently geeky I think I should win by default. I've been a fan of Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, Victorian mathematician and THE FIRST proto-computer programmer prior even to the complete construction of a computer, (and incidentally, daughter of bad-boy poet Lord Byron) ever since I read Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach about 15 years ago. My opinion of her was confirmed by reading a biography of Charles Babbage (The Difference Engine by Doron Swade) and his analytical engine, one of the earliest mechanical(!) general-purpose computers. Plus, amongst her teachers, she counts (no pun intended) Mary Somerville (1780-1872, mathematician, astronomer, writer, polymath, responsible amongst other things for bringing Laplace to the English-speaking world, a immeasurably important advancement in the history of physics). How cool is that?
And what was the first computer programme? An algorithm for generating Bernoulli numbers, no less! No mean feat... those Bernouilli's -everyone's favorite mathematical family empire... there were eight of them- didn't mess around. Though this (Jakob) was not the Bernoulli responsible for Bernoulli's equation... that was his nephew Daniel.
This has lead to an interesting random walk through cyberspace, where I've found The Mathematics Genealogy Project! This is cool because I've been told that my scientific lineage leads back through a series of so-and-so trained by such-and-such to Sir Isaac Newton himself. I didn't know there were scholars of "mathematical genealogy"... now I can see if I can trace my "genealogy"... at least as long as physicists count to the historians of math. Unfortunately, the database cites one student for Newton (Cotes), who in turn had a single student (Smith) for whom they list no students, so I'm at a dead end. I shall have to try going back in time, rather than forward.
See? Doesn't this justify why I should win this contest?
[On a not-particularly-related note, I'm finding the previous post illuminating, as clearly several people I do not know have stumbled upon this blog, since yesterday. Why, I wonder? They may have stumbled upon it earlier but they've visited since yesterday]