Book review

Computing was in a state of crisis. As the price of the hardware continued to fall, and the power of processors continued to rise, the cost of programming the devices was becoming a major part of the overall cost. Small wonder. In 1954, although there were only a few dozen computers in existence, their programming was carried by a small army of experts coding at worst in binary code and at best in some form of assembler. Enter John Backus. This somewhat unorthodox but brilliant mathematician had been hired off the street by IBM in 1949 to work on its Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) computer. As a result of his experience there, he realised that the only way out of this impasse was to enable programmers to code more efficiently using a higher level of abstraction. But that would not, itself, be sufficient. It would be essential that the final binary code produced by any automatic coding system be as efficient as that being produced by the laborious hand coding.

Academician CAIUS IACOB – a Brilliant Mathematician Fascinated by Mechanics

The paper presents some interesting aspects related to the biography and works of Romanian mathematician Caius Iacob (1912–1992). He was famous for his works in the fields of mathematical analysis, fluid mechanics, classical hydrodynamics and compressible-flow theory. At the age of 19, he graduated from the Mathematics Faculty in Bucharest, and then he went to Paris to continue his studies at the Faculty of Sciences, where he worked on a PhD thesis under the advice of famous French mathematician Henri Villat. On 24 June 1935, Caius Iacob successfully presented to the Sorbonne committee his PhD thesis about “Determination of conjugated harmonic functions with some limit conditions, and their applications in hydrodynamics”. Returning to Romania, Caius Iacob had a long and successful career teaching mathematics and mechanics at the universities of Timişoara, Cluj and Bucharest. His most important work is considered the “Mathematical introduction to the mechanics of fluids”. This book, providing original ways to work with classical hydrodynamics and compressible-flow theory, was published in Romanian in 1952 and in French in 1959. In 1955, he was elected a Corresponding Member of the Romanian Academy, becoming a titular Member in 1963. He was also President of the Mathematics Section of the Romanian Academy from 1980 until the end of his life, in 1992. In 1991, he initiated the foundation of the “Romanian Academy Institute of Applied Mathematics”. In 2001 the institute merged with the “Centre for Mathematical Statistics”, which had been created in 1964 by mathematician Gheorghe Mihoc, thus creating the “Gheorghe Mihoc – Caius Iacob Institute of Mathematical Statistics and Applied Mathematics” of the Romanian Academy.

Pythagoreanism

Pythagoreanism is a modern term referring to a multifaceted phenomenon that covered different aspects of the ancient world such as political life, religion, philosophy, and science and existed in only partly overlapping forms. Its originator, Pythagoras of Samos, moved c. 530 bce to Italian Croton, where his followers, the Pythagoreans, organized a political society, whose participants were at the same time encouraged to undertake various intellectual pursuits. Pythagoras’s best attested doctrine is transmigration of the soul, whereas philosophical theories and scientific discoveries ascribed to him are highly disputed. Often he is regarded as a purely religious thinker, though not a single religious figure is known of among his followers. All known ancient Pythagoreans belong to five overlapping categories: politicians, athletes, doctors, natural philosophers, and mathematical scientists. After Pythagoras’s death the Pythagorean societies politically dominated in Croton, Metapontum, Tarentum, and other cities of Southern Italy until the anti-Pythagorean uprising (c. 450), when many Pythagoreans were killed or forced to flee to mainland Greece. The last center of Pythagoreanism in Italy remained in Tarentum, led in 367–361 by Archytas, a successful general and brilliant mathematician. The Pythagorean school created theoretical arithmetic and mathematical harmonics and greatly contributed to natural philosophy, geometry, and astronomy. Its disappearance after 350 bce marked the end of ancient Pythagoreanism. A new form of Pythagoreanism without the Pythagoreans were the pseudo-Pythagorean writings ascribed to Pythagoras and his fictitious family members. The first wave of Pseudo-Pythagorica (late 4th to late 2nd centuries bce) was neither numerous nor popular but since the early 1st century bce it was superseded by the second, more successful wave that was part of the emerging Neopythagoreanism. These treatises written under the names of historical and fictional Pythagoreans and containing Stoic, Platonic, and Aristotelian doctrines aimed to present Pythagoras and his followers as the precursors of Plato and Aristotle. The first Neopythagoreans writing under their own names appeared in the mid-1st century ce and doctrinally belonged to Middle Platonism. The most important representatives of late antique Pythagoreanism were the Neoplatonists Porphyry and especially Iamblichus, who secured its existence until the end of Antiquity.

Nicole Oresme (1320–1382)

The pantheon of classical liberal thinkers must honor the memory of one brilliant mathematician, scientist, and debunker of superstitious beliefs, the sound-money advocate Nicole Oresme. Although his opposition to the recoinage practices of the French monarchy was not unprecedented in the fourteenth century, Oresme must be credited with anticipating the “rational expectations” in economics when he distinguished quite forcefully between “preannounced debasement” and “secret debasement” and their effects on the distribution of wealth. Oresme explains that the king should not practice secret debasement, and can appear as a pioneer for modern ideas on monetary surprises.

Edmund Gunter (1581–1626)

The year 1981 marks the fourth centenary of the birth of Edmund Gunter who, during his relatively short life, played a dominant role in England in the advancement of navigation. Born in Hertfordshire, of Welsh parentage, Gunter was educated at Westminster School before entering Christchurch College, Oxford, where he graduated BA in 1603; MA in 1606; and BD in 1615, in which year he was presented to the living at St George's, Southwark.As early as 1603 Gunter had written an account of a ‘New Projection of the Sphere’ which was circulated in manuscript among some of his mathematical acquaintances. This appears to have gained for him the friendship of Henry Briggs, the first Gresham Professor of Geometry and a brilliant mathematician best known for having been first to suggest a table of logarithms to base 10 – ‘common logarithms’, as they are now known.

Sir Paul Neile, F. R. S. (1613-1686)

SIR PAUL NEILE is the only one of the twelve founder members of the Royal Society of whom there is no record in the Dictionary of National Biography . We should know little of his activities were it not for the entries in the Journal Books of the Society and the references to him by Evelyn and in Huygens, correspondence. He was the son of Richard Neile, Archbishop of York and the father of William Neile, F.R.S. (1637-1670), a brilliant mathematician whose early death was a great loss to the Society. Paul Neile was born at Westminster in 1613 and was admitted as a Fellow Commoner to Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1627, at the age of 14. He was one of the Ushers of the Privy Chamber to Charles I and was knighted in 1633, when he is described as of Sutton Bonvill, Yorks, N.R. He was M.P. for Ripon in the Short Parliament of 1640. He married Elizabeth, daughter of Gabriel Clark, D.D., Archdeacon of Durham, and their eldest son William was born at York in 1637.