On the Shoulders of Giants
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
- Isaac Newton
So much can be learned just by going back in time and treading the footsteps of those who have walked roads less taken. Conversely, little can be learned without studying history. A good student of any discipline is always a student of the history of that discipline.
The rabbit hole of the history of science has a peculiar nature. As you venture deeper into it, the walls — of people and problems and motivations and inspirations — start closing in, and the mind is constrained to recognize scientific breakthroughs simply as natural consequences of a small set of events — as inevitable to those events (or to the walls) as a corollary to a theorem. This series of posts is my attempt at recreating that inevitability in the minds of readers.
… there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
- G. H. Hardy (A Mathematician’s Apology)
The effect I seek cannot be achieved without dumbing things down, and for that, like Hardy, you have my apology. However, it is some consolation that Einstein allegedly said,
If you cannot explain something simply, you have not understood it well enough.
This is my ulterior motive. Every month, I will attempt to explain — and thereby understand — anecdotes, quotations and events from the history of science and how they impact the fascinating world around us: theorems that lead to algorithms, results that lead to laws and questions that lead to miracles.
Stay tuned for more.
