A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.
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JF Ptak Science Books Reference Post
This is the start of what I hope to be a useful page of interesting and useful texts and timeline/chronological links for the history of mathematics. I’ll be adding to this over time.
The Development of Categorical Logics–John L. Bell
A Short Account of the History of Mathematics–W. Rouse Ball
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post 
It is interesting to think about the newness of old things, particularly English words that we have in use every day. In this case I’m referring to words in the sciences–and not necessarily the words coming in the 20th century following the explosion of modernity beginning in 1895. It is surprising sometimes to realize the relative newness of some terms, like, for example, “scientist”. The word “science” is very old and very old in English, but the word “scientist” is coined only in 1833. It is surprising to think of the modernity of some of the words when by their constant use they seem as though they must be ancient, but of course are not so.
Here’s a quick lising of some interesting candidates, everyday words with a not-very-old lineage, their dates taken from first-usages identified by the Oxford English Dictionary:
Altimeter, 1847; Ampere, 1861; Aphasia, 1867;
Bacterium, 1847; Biology, 1802;
Cambrian , 1836; Centigrade, 1812; Chlorophyll, 1810; Chromosome, 1890; Claustrophobia, 1879; Cosmology, 1730; Cretacious, 1832;
Diatom, 1854;
Electron, 1891; Embryology; 1859; Ethnology, 1842;
Gastritis, 1806; Gynaecology, 1847;
Histology, 1847;
Joule, 1882; Jurassic, 1833;
Kleptomania, 1830;
Morphology, 1830;
Ohm, 1861;
Palaeobotany, 1872; Palaeography, 1822; Palaeolithic, 1865; Palaeontology, 1838; Petrology, 1811; Pilocene, 1833;
Scientist, 1833; Symbiosis, 1877; Synthesis, 1804;
Taxonomy, 1828; Triassic , 1841;
Voltmeter, 1882;
Watt, 1882.
JF Ptak Science Books Post 692 (from 2009) Expanded
This post was written five yers ago when I was excited to find an illustration of a dreamer and numbers with some mathematical content. I thought that it was pretty unusual to find as an illsutrastion, even though I had read many stories of people being influenced byt their dreams, evem in the sciences, but that there were few images of the process. In Post 692 I psoted a found image of such a thing that was just a simple advertisement in a German magazine. There was also a series of images from Francis Galton on imaging arithmetical processes from Nature back in 1880, which may also be the first scientific article on synesthesia. And there doesn’t seem to be a lot more than this, even in canonical illustration.
So it came as a surprise today to find this photo to add to the small collection of math dreams and imagery of “doing” math (from ca. 1880):
Thinking big thoughts in dreams is generally not a common thing, as anyone who has read their own semi-conscious half-awake memory notes of a dream-based inspiration could attest. But it does happen: 
Paul McCartney1 dreamed the song Yesterday, Gandhi dreamed the source of non-violent resistance, Elias Howe dreamed of the construction of the first sewing machine, and Mary Shelley the creation of her novel Frankenstein… For good or for ill, William Blake was evidently deeply influenced by his own dreams; on the other hand, Rene Magritte was deeply influenced by dreams but didn’t use any of his own for his paintings, or so it was said. Otto Loewi turned an old problem into not one in a dream, finding a solution to the prickish problem of whether nerve impulses were chemical or electrical (and resulting in the Nobel for medicine in 1935); the fabulous discovery of the benzene ring came to August Kekule in a dream as well. Artists have been representing people in dreams and dreamscapes for many centuries: Durer depicted a dream in a 1525 watercolor, for example, and thousands of artists have depicted famous biblical dreams (Joseph of Pharo) for long expanses of time.
What struck me, though, in this illustration found on the other side of the page of the Illustrirte Zeitung2 (for August 1932) that I used for yesterday’s post about damming Gibraltar and Shakespeare’s memories, was the depiction of someone dreaming mathematical thoughts…or at the very least, dreaming numbers. People have undoubtedly dreamed much in mathematics, but I can not recall seeing illustrations of these dreams.
I’m differentiating here from something like a Poincarean inspiration, or vision, or thunderstrike–I’m talking about drop-dead asleep sleep, dreaming sleep, REM and all that. Also I’m differentiating this from imaging mathematical thought, as in the work of Francis Galton in 1880 in which the subject of mentally seeing the process of mathematics is perhaps first addressed. I wrote a short piece on that here, way back in Post 9. )
The numerical sequence in this dream doesn’t look like anything to me: the backwards radicand doesn’t strike anything common in my head. The geometrical drawing under the portrait in the dreamer’s room though is the impossibly iconic Pythagorean theorem, and there is a nice picture of a conic section in the foreground; but the artist, who improbably signed the work “A. Christ”, doesn’t offer much of math in the dreamscape. Still, it is a rare depiction of someone dreaming about math.
Notes
1. “I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, ‘That’s great, I wonder what that is?’ There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th — and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot, but because I’d dreamed it, I couldn’t believe I’d written it. I thought, ‘No, I’ve never written anything like this before.’ But I had the tune, which was the most magic thing!” from Barry Miles (1997), Paul McCartney.
2. This is really a great sheet of paper, coming from issue 4492, pp 518-519. Two pictures of dreams on one side, with three visionary images on the other (the Gibraltar dam, a sub-polar submarine, and a futuristic Indian railway/bridge.
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2175
I always thought that the word “scientist” came to us from William Whewell in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (volume 1, page 113) in 1840, the group of people dedicated intrepid seekers of standards and anomalies finally receiving a short and concise (if three-syllable) name for what it is they are (for even in death a scientist is still a scientist, no past tense there, like a Marine): once one, always one.
“We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a Scientist.”
But I notice that an anonymous note in the Quarterly Review peeks its head under the tent, using the word six years earlier in 1834, though not favorably:
“Science..loses all traces of unity. A curious illustration of this result may be observed in the want of any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively. We are informed that this difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at their meetings..in the last three summers… Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term,..; savans was rather assuming,..; some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist, economist, and atheist—but this was not generally palatable.”–Quarterly Review, volume 51, page 59, via the Oxford English Dictionary
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2173
The War Production Board (WPB)–the entity responsible for printing the leaflets below–was instituted 16 January 1942 as a federal effort to direct U.S. wartime production and allocation of essential commodities. And time. The WPB centralized the effort to convert some peacetime industry to wartime production, as well as direct the production of existing wartime industries in the manufacture of critical goods, and rationed or prohibited the manufacture of other material that could possibly hinder the war effort. Thus the WPB rationed things like sugar, heating oil, plastic, gasoline, paper, rubber, nylon and metals of all descriptions; it also controlled large swaths of the workforce, restricting wages and benefits as well as prices. It was an essential element of fighting the war, and brought necessary control to an economy and industrial base that needed organization for what would become a total war.
Instituting a war-production base for American industry allowed production to ratchet way up, producing (for example) multiples more aircraft more in 1943 than in 1941: 1940, 6k aircraft; 1941, 19k; 1942, 47k; 1943 85k; 1944, 56k; 1945, 46k. Also there were enormous production advancements for total shipping tonnage (reaching a wartime production total of 33 million tons), across-the-board huge increases in coal and iron ore (and especially in crude oil), and on and on. The U.S. was able to mobilize itself and take advantage of its enormous natural resources, industrial base and civilian workforce in what was essentially an unreachable island economy, forming what was actually an unbeatable combination of war goods production. (Plus of course there was the atomic bomb, which is another story, but which also only could have been produced in the U.S., given the enormous quantities of energy and material needed to begin its production.)
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2172
In 1947 the future looks a little red, and sparky, and filled with television.
This image is that of the television antenna of station WNBT and for many years it sat on top of the Empire State Building. WNBT was the flagship station of NBC, which was owned by RCA (Radio Corporation of America, 1919-1986) which (according to its name) was really the first national broadcasting radio network in the United States, and which (as experimental station W2XBS) became the first to broadcast a television picture (of a papier mache Felix the Cat) in 1928. This fantastic cover art for a 1947 promotional for the company pictured the famous antenna, the great visual of the company’s external hardware, right there on top of the world’s tallest building.
This was really a picture of the future, and in 1947 the future of mass communications and entertainment (and in making money in the two) was seen in television, much more so than the formerly gargantuan radio.
And why red? Was it latent images for a few decades of seeing Lenin marching forward with a poiny figure and folllowed by legions againsst a background of deep red? Or is it the hundreds of years of red being associated with power–it did cost a fair amount, centuries ago, given the difficulty of its manufacture.
And in the history of red the business of its business was obtuse and secret. The Spanish began exporting the source of red–the cochineal bug, which was a tiny cactus-borne bug–from Mexico. They sent barrels of these bugs back home, where they were pounded and prepared for the Spanish worthies’ textiles. The source of the color was held as secretly as possible, making the bug as odd a guarded source as the secretive history of medical forceps so long shrouded in mystery by their progenitors, the Chamberlain family. So red was expensive, limiting its use to the ruling/economic powers. It would also start showing up in art in the depiction of robes for royalty, or for robes for Mary and Jesus, and occasionally in Renaissance skies. Alternatively, it is also associated with Hell and Satan, I assume that is the case since red was not-often used (given the cost) and so it was a rare-ish color that would strike the viewer as being exceptional.
That said, I’m not sure why RCA chose red for their sky in 1947, though the company did have its famous “red Seal” label beginning in 1902 and used the color freely in its logo. Aside from that, why there is a red sky is a bit of a mystery.
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Sir William Siemens (1823-1883) was an important inventor who had an even larger genius for the application of his ideas, mostly in the fields of heat and electricity and power. He occasionally strayed into the pure sciences, the work of which was sometimes fruitful and sometimes not. The illustration below is from an idea of the second variety, something where he applied his work in the regenerative furnace to the conservation of solar energy. It was an adventurous and unworkable, although the illustration he used to illustrate a paper on the subject (in Nature, 9 March 1882) was drop-dead beautiful.
JF Ptak Science Books (Expanding an ealier post #610 from 2010)
I am very attracted to the innocence and softly bizarre category of my store’s Naïve Surreal Collection, like this little pamphlet that came out New York in 1945. The titles in this category are odd but still understandable, and the “what the ____!” response to the subtle ones isn’t quite so high and the exclamation points not so many as in the cases of the Naive Surreal titles.
Bizarre is just that, certainly not hiding behind any lesser or ambiguous title–it seems to be a parody of small magazines and their advertising sponsors, and copyrighted by the very far-reaching Hugo Gernsback, who in 1926 started the first magazine dedicated to the genre of science fiction (Amazing Stories) and for whom the World Science Fiction Society’s annual award for Science Fiction Achievement is named (the “Hugo”). Gernsback evidently had a taste for cheeky parody, producing similar magazines to this called Quip, Forecast, Jolliers, Tame and Newspeep.
I guess that this was deeply weird for mass-production publication, and it was probably funny–now it is just weird, odd, and somewhat discomforting–a successful and intentional reach for being part of the Naive Surreal right from the start.
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
[Hugo Gernsback with his TV glasses, 1963]
The “Experimental Visual License” is a very nice turn-of-phrase, and it occurs in a technical and less poetic sense in this nteresting and nicely designed pamphlet from the earliest days of popular commentary on the new medium of television. The ABC of Television was published in 1937 by the exceptional and extremely busy Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967, basically the inventor of the SciFi magazine) in his Short Wave & Television journal.
The pamphlet includes technical basics (“fundamentals of scanning”, “mechanical systems”, “Cathode ray emission”, transmitter operation”) as well as some popular and necessary information, like “when will we have television” and a list of television stations.
Just for the record, this publication lists 25 active stations, including low wattage stations like W2XAX, the Atlantic Broadcasting Company, in NYC at 50 Watts–there were 9 broadcasters with 150 Watts or less of the 25 listed. There’s also a list of nine other “discontinued” television stations (“experimental visual licenses and permits discontinued or expired”), which is where that phrase crackles into life.
JF Ptak Science Books An earlier post (#1308) expanded
If I was in a time machine, stepping back through a wormhole and into another segment of another reality, one of the places I’d least want to step into would be a cramped, cold, wet, dirty and dangerous place. Like this American soldier, waiting for a German attack to begin so that he could launch a warning flare to the rest of the soldiers, hunkered down in a cold wet place in the front line along the Lorraine section in France, mid-way through 1918 and almost all-the-way-through WWI.
And even though this soldier looks far too clean, and his uniform far too spotless and pressed-ish, and his calf-skin gloves too calf-skinny, and his duffle too unmarred, and his helmet chinstrap too perfect for this man to actually have been fighting, the sensation of cold/bad/dangerous still gets through the whitewash.
There are of course much worse places to be, but I think if I limited my time travel to include what I would be on the other end–a U.S. soldier–one of the places at te top of te list would be a generic trench in the front line of a battle late in the fighting in WWI. Sitting there, watchful, waiting for the advance of thousands of German troops, charging over a ruined and sulfurous landscape, waiting for the ruination to begin as it churned its way through No Man’s Land. Of course it could be worse–one could be going “over the top”, charging across the Desolate Place towards a line of thousands of entrenched soldiers all of whom were trying to kill. you.
Or of course you could be in a blue coat marching in a straight line towards a series of long lines of men in red coats, everyone getting ready to get close enough to discharge an 69-calibre (or thereabouts) ball across an open plane of hundreds of feet into the ranks of the opponent. Or being in a Marine uniform in Tarawa, in the Gilberts, in November 1943. Or being in Butternut, crossing the Emmitsburg Road on the way up Cemetery Ridge on 3 July, or being in any uniform whatsoever at Antietam.
The places and times get worse I think once you allow yourself to be any other solider in any other uniform. A French soldier, for example, sitting in a similar spot in the same battle along a front line as our American Doughboy, above, would’ve been worse. A Belgian soldier virtually anywhere also would have fared worse, statistically, than just about anyone else in WWI. Being a newly-minted soldier wearing the uniform of the Soviet Socialist Republics in the Summer of 1941 would probably have been half-a-death-sentence. Of course the list goes on, and on.
Perhaps one of the worst inventions in the history of warfare was The Trench. Millions of men were wounded or met their ends while defending one, or attacking one, or being in-between two of them. Hundreds of thousands of troops spent months charging back and forth between opposing lines, the ground over which they fought made uninhabitable for almost any form of life. Cold, wet, bad.
Here’s another original photograph made by the Western Newspaper Union Photo Service, as a “British Official Photograph” (with the “British” part penciled out and replaced by an unknown hand, “Italian”), The photo agency supplied a caption for the image (that was supposed to have been used by the newspaper or magazine that published the picture) as follows:
And the detail:
