Carl Gottfried Neumann

1993 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 345-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Disalle

The ArgumentCarl Gottfried Neumann was born in Königsberg, Prussia, in 1832 and died in Leipzig in 1925. His father was the physicist Franz Neumann (1798–1895), notable for his contributions not only to the study of electricity and magnetism but also to the development of physics education in nineteenth-century Germany. Carl Neumann studied at the University of Königsberg and received his doctorate in 1855 with a work on the application of elliptic integrals to mechanics (Neumann 1856). In 1858 he became Privatdozent, and in 1863 Professor of Mathematics at Halle. Later that same year he moved to Basel, and in 1865 he became Ordinary Professor of Mathematics at Tübingen. Finally in 1868 he was appointed Professor of Mathematics at Leipzig, a post he held until he retired in 1911; of the two mathematics professorships at Leipzig, this was the one formerly held by F. A. Möbius, and it was officially devoted to “the higher mathematics, especially physics” (quoted in Jungnickel and McCormmach 1986, 1:181). So Neumann's academic career, along with his role as one of the founding editors of the Mathematische Annalen beginning in 1869, can be seen as reflecting the enormous advance in mathematical sophistication that German physics underwent in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

1968 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 37-60 ◽  

V. H. Blackman’s academic career spanned an era during which botany became an experimental subject and the interpretation of plant behaviour in terms of contemporary chemistry, physics and mathematics was an exciting new prospect. In Britain during the latter part of the nineteenth century, as he himself remarked, classification was pursued with an enthusiasm which almost excluded other aspects of botany; a circumstance attributed to the expansion of Empire which gave access to many new floras. Blackman belonged to the generations of men whose schooling was entirely in the classical tradition but who yet became professors of science subjects. In the nineteenth century such men expected to teach and discuss every aspect of their chosen discipline and prosecution of research was not an obligation for the teacher; the incentive was curiosity and the reward intellectual. Vocational opportunities were limited to the small university community, the schools and the herbaria of the state institutions. The men who accepted these posts were usually characterized by a strict sense of duty, a high standard of integrity, and a respect for learning. In the university they had almost complete freedom of action and time to think. Blackman was a fastidious and somewhat shy man who maintained the exacting standards of such scholars. He was always immaculate in appearance, unfailingly courteous and never apparently hurried. He trusted his staff and students absolutely and in an effortless and perhaps unconscious manner exercised a remarkable and benign authority which served to impress on those who worked with him, to their lasting benefit, the value of his tenets. Vernon Herbert Blackman was born on 8 January 1872 at a house in York Road, Lambeth, near Waterloo Station. His father, Frederick Blackman, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., practised medicine in the area which included slum streets into which his sisters were not allowed.


1989 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-366
Author(s):  
A. I. C. Heron

In 1988 the Reformed Church in Bavaria commemorated the life and work of August Ebrard (1818–1888), the first Professor Ordinarius of Reformed Theology in the University of Erlangen. Ebrard is today almost completely forgotten; Karl Barth is reported to have opined that his theology was ‘deader than dead’. Yet he was a remarkable man, successively Professor in Erlangen, Konsistorialrat in Speyer, independent author and lecturer, finally minister of the French Reformed congregation in Erlangen (as his father had been long before). He contributed considerably to the maintenance and strengthening of the Reformed witness in Germany in the nineteenth century, took up the cudgels to defend the faith against D. F. Strauss on the one hand and Haeckel's Darwinism on the other, and published voluminous theological works, from biblical exegesis through church history to dogmatics, apologetics and practical theology, including liturgies, hymnology and sacramentalia. His interests were wider still; he was a kind of nineteenth century ‘renaissance man’, his studies extending inter alia to geology, mineralogy, musical theory and linguistics; learned, cultivated, busily writing up to the day of his death. Alongside his specifically theological works stand historical novels (written under the pen-name Gottfried Flammberg), poems, travel reports, an autobiography of Herculean proportions and such special gems as a System of Musical Acoustics and a Handbook of Middle Gaelic. Ground enough there alone for a Scot occupying Ebrard's chair a century after his death to look more closely at the man and his writings! Ebrard's papers are preserved in the Erlangen City Archives.


1989 ◽  
Vol 5 (20) ◽  
pp. 321-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy C. Davis

The recent revaluation and exploration of ninetenth-century theatre has gone almost in parallel with the development of contemporary feminist criticism: yet the one approach has all too rarely meshed with the other. Here, Tracy C. Davis attempts a feminist critique of that distinctively Victorian phenomenon, the display of naked and near-naked female flesh in the theatre – at a time when even the legs of pianos were discreetly veiled in respectable drawing-rooms. She questions how the conventions of stage costume were able to defy conventional proprieties, how that defiance ‘served the heterosexual male hegemonic aesthetic’, and how it related to ways of ‘seeing’ nudity during the nineteenth century. Presently teaching in the Drama Department of the University of Calgary, Tracy C. Davis has contributed widely to theatrical journals, and her study of ‘The Employment of Children in the Victorian Theatre’ was included in NTQ6 (1986).


Author(s):  
J.A. Eades ◽  
E. Grünbaum

In the last decade and a half, thin film research, particularly research into problems associated with epitaxy, has developed from a simple empirical process of determining the conditions for epitaxy into a complex analytical and experimental study of the nucleation and growth process on the one hand and a technology of very great importance on the other. During this period the thin films group of the University of Chile has studied the epitaxy of metals on metal and insulating substrates. The development of the group, one of the first research groups in physics to be established in the country, has parallelled the increasing complexity of the field.The elaborate techniques and equipment now needed for research into thin films may be illustrated by considering the plant and facilities of this group as characteristic of a good system for the controlled deposition and study of thin films.


2000 ◽  
pp. 20-25
Author(s):  
O. O. Romanovsky

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the nature of the national policy of Russia is significantly changing. After the events of 1863 in Poland (the Second Polish uprising), the government of Alexander II gradually abandoned the dominant idea of ​​anathematizing, whose essence is expressed in the domination of the principle of serving the state, the greatness of the empire. The tsar-reformer deliberately changes the policy of etatamism into the policy of state ethnocentrism. The manifestation of such a change is a ban on teaching in Polish (1869) and the temporary closure of the University of Warsaw. At the end of the 60s, the state's policy towards a five million Russian Jewry was radically revised. The process of abolition of restrictions on travel, education, place of residence initiated by Nicholas I, was provided reverse.


2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Funk

In the history of botany, Adam Zalužanský (d. 1613), a Bohemian physician, apothecary, botanist and professor at the University of Prague, is a little-known personality. Linnaeus's first biographers, for example, only knew Zalužanský from hearsay and suspected he was a native of Poland. This ignorance still pervades botanical history. Zalužanský is mentioned only peripherally or not at all. As late as the nineteenth century, a researcher would be unaware that Zalužanský’s main work Methodi herbariae libri tres actually existed in two editions from two different publishers (1592, Prague; 1604, Frankfurt). This paper introduces the life and work of Zalužanský. Special attention is paid to the chapter “De sexu plantarum” of Zalužanský’s Methodus, in which, more than one hundred years before the well-known De sexu plantarum epistola of R. J. Camerarius, the sexuality of plants is suggested. Additionally, for the first time, an English translation of Zalužanský’s chapter on plant sexuality is provided.


2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. G. MOORE

Attention is drawn to the one side remaining of a nineteenth-century correspondence addressed to Alexander Somerville that is housed in the archives of the Scottish Association for Marine Science at Oban, concerning conchological matters. Previously unstudied letters from James Thomas Marshall shed new light on the practicalities of offshore dredging by nineteenth-century naturalists in the Clyde Sea Area; on personalities within conchology; on the controversies that raged among the conchological community about the production of an agreed list of British molluscan species and on the tensions between conchology and malacology. In particular, the criticism of Canon A. E. Norman's ideas regarding taxonomic revision of J. G. Jeffreys's British conchology, as expressed by Marshall, are highlighted.


1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger

This article is the revised text of the first W A Wilson Memorial Lecture, given in the Playfair Library, Old College, in the University of Edinburgh, on 17 May 1995. It considers various visions of Scots law as a whole, arguing that it is now a system based as much upon case law and precedent as upon principle, and that its departure from the Civilian tradition in the nineteenth century was part of a general European trend. An additional factor shaping the attitudes of Scots lawyers from the later nineteenth century on was a tendency to see themselves as part of a larger Englishspeaking family of lawyers within the British Empire and the United States of America.


2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.


2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
L. P. Hwi ◽  
J. W. Ting

Cecil Cameron Ewing (1925-2006) was a lecturer and head of ophthalmology at the University of Saskatchewan. Throughout his Canadian career, he was an active researcher who published several articles on retinoschisis and was the editor of the Canadian Journal of Ophthalmology. For his contributions to Canadian ophthalmology, the Canadian Ophthalmological Society awarded Ewing a silver medal. Throughout his celebrated medical career, Ewing maintained his passion for music. His love for music led him to be an active member in choir, orchestra, opera and chamber music in which he sang and played the piano, violin and viola. He was also the director of the American Liszt Society and a member for over 40 years. The connection between music and ophthalmology exists as early as the 18th Century. John Taylor (1703-1772) was an English surgeon who specialized in eye diseases. On the one hand, Taylor was a scientist who contributed to ophthalmology by publishing books on ocular physiology and diseases, and by advancing theories of strabismus. On the other hand, Taylor was a charlatan who traveled throughout Europe and blinded many patients with his surgeries. Taylor’s connection to music was through his surgeries on two of the most famous Baroque composers: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and George Frederick Handel (1685-1759). Bach had a painful eye disorder and after two surgeries by Taylor, Bach was blind. Handel had poor or absent vision prior to Taylor’s surgery, and his vision did not improve after surgery. The connection between ophthalmology and music spans over three centuries from the surgeries of Taylor to the musical passion of Ewing. Ewing E. Cecil Cameron Ewing. BMJ 2006; 332(7552):1278. Jackson DM. Bach, Handel, and the Chevalier Taylor. Med Hist 1968; 12(4):385-93. Zegers RH. The Eyes of Johann Sebastian Bach. Arch Ophthalmol 2005; 123(10):1427-30.


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