scholarly journals George Paget Thomson, 3 May 1892 - 10 September 1975

1977 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 529-556 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
World War ◽  
Chain Reaction ◽  
Cavendish Laboratory ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
Public Work ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
Mathematical Skill ◽  
Intractable Problem

George Paget Thomson was born in Cambridge on 3 May 1892 and died there on 10 September 1975. His father, Joseph John Thomson, had been Cavendish Professor for seven years when he was born, while his mother (Rose Paget) was the daughter of another very distinguished Cambridge professor, and before marrying J. J. Thomson had worked as one of his students in the Cavendish Laboratory. Cambridge, physics and mathematics were in George’s blood and he greatly enriched the first two of these. Best known for the discovery of the diffraction of electrons, he was a substantial contributor, scientifically and politically, to the early stages of the study of neutrons and to their use by way of the uranium chain-reaction; he also independently initiated work on the still-intractable problem of releasing energy by controlled nuclear fusion. Largely, though not originally, through his service in World War I, aerodynamics was an important interest for Thomson; in this, his mathematical skill was joined with a spirit of practical enquiry, for he flew aircraft as well as theorizing about them. After professorships in Aberdeen and London, during which the bulk of his scientific and public work was done, he returned to Cambridge as Master of Corpus Christi College, where he had been a young Fellow after graduating from Trinity College. Through this appointment, Corpus gained a still vigorous and a far-sighted Head, while Thomson had the satisfaction of guiding new college ventures and the enjoyment of being a superb host in Hall, Combination Room and Master’s Lodge.

Verifying the theory of relativity

1976 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-260 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
World War ◽  
Clay Pipes ◽  
Egyptian Government ◽  
White Clay

THE events I want to talk about took place more than fifty years ago. They are centred during World War I and the years immediately following. The principal actors in those events are famous men; they were, at least to their contemporaries, among the great men of science. I am not in a position to judge whether those men will be treated with the same reverence today as they were during my years in Cambridge, in the early and in the middle 1930s. Still, I hope that none of us will feel inclined to be disrespectful of the men and events I shall recall. Let me begin, then, with a conversation that took place in the Senior Combination Room in Trinity College, after dinner in hall, during the Christmas recess of 1933. During the Christmas recess, very few people normally dine in the College. On this particular occasion there were only five of us: Lord Rutherford, Sir Arthur Eddington, Sir Maurice Amos (at one time, during the 1920s, the Chief Judicial Advisor to the Egyptian government), Dr Patrick Du Val (a distinguished geometer), and myself. After dinner, we all sat around a fire and everyone, except myself, was smoking long white clay pipes—a traditional English custom during Christmas. Rutherford was in great form and was naturally the centre of the conversation.

The Remarkable Story

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven J. Osterlind
Keyword(s):  
Probability Theory ◽  
World War I ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Conditional Probabilities ◽  
World War ◽  
Bell Curve ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
Napoleonic Era ◽  
And Mathematics

This chapter introduces the extraordinary story of “quantification,” the perception of seeing things—both the everyday and the extraordinary—through the lens of quantifiable events (i.e., via odds, probability, and likelihood). This concept arose when people learned how to measure uncertainty, through the development of probability theory. The chapter presents many examples of using probability for measuring uncertainty and sets the historical context for the following chapters by showing how the idea of quantification developed during a relatively brief period in history, roughly from the end of Napoleonic era through the start of World War I. This era saw a torrent of mathematical developments, specifically, the invention of probability theory, the bell curve, regressions, Bayesian conditional probabilities, and psychometrics. The chapter also explains that this book is not a history of probability theory but a story of how history and mathematics came together to fashion the current worldview.

scholarly journals Polish mathematicians and mathematics in World War I. Part I: Galicia (Austro-Hungarian Empire)

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 23-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanisław Domoradzki ◽  
Małgorzata Stawiska ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Mathematical Community ◽  
Institutions Of Higher Education ◽  
World War ◽  
Scientific Societies ◽  
Academic Level ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
Traditional Institutions ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
Polytechnical School

In this article we present diverse experiences of Polish mathematicians (in a broad sense) who during World War I fought for freedom of their homeland or conducted their research and teaching in difficult wartime circumstances. We discuss not only individual fates, but also organizational efforts of many kinds (teaching at the academic level outside traditional institutions, Polish scientific societies, publishing activities) in order to illustrate the formation of modern Polish mathematical community. In Part I we focus on mathematicians affiliated with the existing Polish institutions of higher education: Universities in Lwów in Kraków and the Polytechnical School in Lwów, within the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Martin Rivers Pollock. 10 December 1914 – 21 December 1999

2002 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 357-373
Author(s):  
Richard P. Ambler ◽  
Kenneth Murray
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Attorney General ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
World War ◽  
College Hospital ◽  
Royal Air Force ◽  
Senior Scholar ◽  
The Family ◽  
Newcastle Upon Tyne

Martin Rivers Pollock was born in Liverpool on 10 December 1914. He came from an old legal family, being the great-great-grandson of Sir Jonathan Frederick Pollock, Bt. (1783–1870), a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, barrister, MP for Huntingdon, Attorney General in Peel's first administration and Chief Baron of the Exchequer from 1844 to 1866. His father, Hamilton Rivers Pollock, also went to Trinity College, qualified as a barrister but never practised, and in 1914 was with the Cunard Steam Ship Company, before spending World War I with the Liverpool Regiment and the Royal Air Force. His mother was Eveline Morton Bell, daughter of Thomas Bell, of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. After the war his father inherited a fortune from an uncle, and the family moved to Wessex, where they lived first at splendid Anderson Manor, Dorset, and then Urchfont Manor, Wiltshire, his father living as a country squire and JP. Pollock had a conventional upper-class education, beginning with a nanny, followed by West Downs School (1923–28) and then Winchester College (1928–33). His first scientific enthusiasm was for astronomy, but he decided he was insufficiently mathematical to pursue it further (his mathematics master was Clement Durrell, author of some famous texts including Advanced algebra), so he then decided to study medicine. His Wessex schooldays were influenced by the nearby Powys brothers, the youngest (Llewelyn1) having been a Cambridge friend and contemporary of his father. Through Sylvia Townsend Warner2 he met her cousin Janet, daughter of Arthur Llewelyn Machen3, who eventually, in 1979, became his second wife. He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1933, having done his first MB and the first part of his second MB while still at school, and opting to do the two new half-subjects (Pathology and Biochemistry) that had just been instituted—he remembered thinking at the time that biochemistry was going to be the key subject for medicine in the future. Already while at school he had become a theoretical Communist, and as an undergraduate worked very hard, both at his medical studies and in political activity (such as selling the Daily Worker) for the Party—and knew most of the soon-to-be notorious Cambridge Communists of the time, including Guy Burgess4 and Donald Maclean5. He was now a Senior Scholar, and graduated BA first class in 1936; he started to spend a fourth year reading Part II Biochemistry. He decided in April 1937 that he had spent too long at Cambridge, so moved on to his clinical studies at University College Hospital. He also felt he should try to become qualified before what he saw as the inevitable war started, although he was nearly distracted into joining the International Brigade and going off to Spain—he had been a friend of John Cornford6, who did go to Spain and wrote and died there, and of Norman John (but widely known as James) Klugmann.

scholarly journals John Ashworth Ratcliffe, 12 December 1902 - 25 October 1987

1988 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 669-711
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Post Office ◽  
World War ◽  
Cavendish Laboratory ◽  
Ionospheric Physics ◽  
Electrical Engineers ◽  
The Subject ◽  
University Scientists ◽  
Pure Research ◽  
Physical Principles

When Ratcliffe began research in the Cavendish Laboratory in 1924, ‘wireless’, as it was then called, had started its rapid advance to become a major science. The thermionic valve had been coming into use in World War I. The BBC had been formed and broadcasting had started in 1922. The large Post Office transmitter at Rugby, call sign GBR, frequency 16 kHz, was being built in 1923-24. The presence of conducting regions in the upper atmosphere had been surmised from the work of Balfour Stewart on terrestrial magnetism, and the idea of elevated conducting surfaces to explain the propagation of wireless waves to great distances had been used in some mathematical papers. It was as a branch of physics that wireless had the greatest appeal for Ratcliffe. In his final undergraduate year he had attended lectures by E. V. Appleton (later Sir Edward Appleton, F.R.S.) and they impressed him with the fact that wireless covered a very large part of physics and depended on phenomena discovered in the pure research of the physics laboratory. His first book (1929) was entitled The physical principles of wireless , and when he later organized a Physical Society conference in Cambridge in 1954 he gave it the title ‘The physics of the ionosphere’. In this way the subject now known as ionospheric physics was launched. Ratcliffe was also deeply interested in the applications of electrical science and in the advance of wireless as a part of electrical engineering, and he was to become President of the Institution of Electrical Engineers 1966-67. His teaching and his research were closely linked. He used to say that teaching was his main job and research was a hobby. But he also said that university scientists are paid to teach and promoted for research. He enjoyed lecturing and had the highest reputation for clarity of presentation. His books and papers are models of clear exposition and many of his students would say that in the use of English for scientific explanations he excelled all others.

Tomás Irish, The university at war, 1914–25. Britain, France, and the United States (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), x + 254 pp. ISBN: 9781137409447

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Anderson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
General Study ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
History Of ◽  
Student Exchanges ◽  
The University

This chapter reviews the books The university at war, 1914–25. Britain, France, and the United States (2015) and Trinity in war and revolution, 1912–1923 (2015), both by Tomás Irish. In The university at war, Irish argues that the three western allies—Britain, France, and the United States—had a concerted campaign to mobilise academic ideals as a weapon against Germany during World War I, and as a way of strengthening cooperation among themselves. He shows that American universities were engaged in this project from the start. He also examines a number of significant issues, including the anti-war movements in Britain and America, debates on academic freedom in America, and the promotion of student exchanges in a spirit of internationalism. The broad perspectives of Irish’s general study are complemented by his history of Trinity College Dublin.

scholarly journals Polish mathematicians and mathematics in World War I. Part II. Russian Empire

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 55-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanisław Domoradzki ◽  
Małgorzata Stawiska
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Mathematical Community ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Broad Sense ◽  
World War ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The University

In the second part of our article we continue presentation of individual fates of Polish mathematicians (in a broad sense) and the formation of modern Polish mathematical community against the background of the events of World War I. In particular we focus on the situations of Polish mathematicians in the Russian Empire (including those affiliatedwith the University of Warsaw, reactivated by Germans, and the Warsaw Polytechnics, founded already by Russians) and other countries. Polscy matematycy i polska matematyka w czasach I wojny światowej. Część II. Cesarstwo Rosyjskie Abstrakt W drugiej części artykułu kontynuujemy przedstawianie indywidualnych losów matematyków polskich (w szerokim sensie) oraz kształtowanie się nowoczesnego polskiego środowiska matematycznego na tle wydarzeń pierwszej wojny światowej. W szczególności skupiamy się na sytuacji matematyków polskich w Cesarstwie Rosyjskim (także tych związanych z reaktywowanym przez Niemców Uniwersytetem Warszawskim i utworzoną jeszcze przez Rosjan Politechniką Warszawską) i innych krajach.

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