Today is also the 533 rd. anniversary of the death of the 15th century’s most important mathematician and astronomer, John Miller. Now anybody reading the previous sentence is probably thinking who the f##k is John Miller? Shall we try with his name in the original German, Johannes Müller, is that any better? Probably not, how [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Local Heroes’
July 6, 2009
RIP Mr Ohm
On this day 155 years ago Georg Simon Ohm, he of the resistance omega, departed this life. Almost every day I walk past the little house in Erlangen in which he and his brother Martin, an algebraic logician, were born. Today its the Café Con Leche, which does a good cup of coffee and a [...]
June 15, 2009
City Seductions
This weekend the Nürnberg Stadt(ver)führungen 2009 are taking place and I am involved. The name is a play on words in German, combining the words Stadt (city) Verführung (seduction) and Führung (guided tour). The principle is actually quite simple, over a period of three days literally thousands of themed guided tours of the city are [...]
June 13, 2009
Local Historian
I am a member of that oft ridiculed specious the local historian. A figure much loved by the makers of Hollywood B-movies and TV crime series. The local historian an eccentric, pipe smoking, intellectual figure, and if English, usually with a beard and dressed in a tweed jacket he provides the necessary background information to [...]
June 11, 2009
A loser who was really a winner.
Christoph Clavius (1538-1612) Educational Reformer.
There is an unfortunate tendency amongst non-specialists when viewing the history of science to divide the scientists of the past into ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, famous examples being Copernicus and Ptolemaeus or Darwin and Lamarck. Regarded from this perspective Christoph Clavius is definitely counted amongst the losers, a last deluded defender of [...]
