Tillway Talk

Remembering one of India's most famous scientists on his birth anniversary: Satyendra Nath Bose (1 January 1894 – 4 February 1974) was an Indian mathematician  and physicist specialising in theoretical physics. He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, collaboration with Albert Einstein in developing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was awarded India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan in 1954 by the Government of India. He was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics.  The class of particles that obey Bose–Einstein statistics, bosons, was named after Bose by Paul Dirac. A polymath, he had a wide range of interests in varied fields including physics, mathematics,  chemistry, biology, mineralogy, philosophy, literature, and music. He served on many research and development committees in sovereign India. Early Life: Bose was born in...

My tribute to the author whose works  gave me many  pleasant hours in my childhood: James Cornwall passed away  on Dec 12 this year at the age of 89, a victim of pneumonia. He is more popularly known as John le Carré.  His first novel that I read was 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold'. It fired my imagination. He elevated the espionage novel to a totally different level. One can say that Le Carré was to the spy novel what O. Henry was to the short story.  He seemed to  made the cold war come alive on a  chessboard, with the spymasters manipulating their human 'pieces' with a skill which players like Fischer, Kasparov,  Carlsen can only dream of attaining. Many of the cognoscenti regard his novels as the best works of English fiction to be published in the latter half of the twentieth century.  His hero in most of his novels was George Smiley, the very antithesis of James Bond when it came to women.  However, Smiley's craft and his modus...

Remembering Sir Upendranath Brahmachari, one of the nation's outstanding scientists,  on his birth anniversary: Rai Bahadur Sir Upendranath Brahmachari (19 December 1873 – 6 February 1946) was an Indian scientist and a leading medical practitioner of his time.  He was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize, in 1929 and 1942.  Early life: Upendranath Brahmachari was born on 19 December 1873 in Sardanga village in Burdwan District of West Bengal, India. His father Nilmony Brahmachari was a physician in the  East Indian Railways. His mother's name was Saurabh Sundari Devi. In 1898, he married Nani Bala Devi. Education: He completed his early education from Eastern Railways Boys' High School, Jamalpur. In 1893, he passed BA degree from Hooghly Mohsin College with honours in Mathematics and Chemistry. Thereafter he went to study Medicine and Higher Chemistry. He passed his master's degree in 1894 from the Presidency College, Kolkata. In the M.B. Examination of 1900 of the Un...

The life of Kurt Gödel: Considered along with Aristotle to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century,  Kurt Friedrich Gödel (1906–1978) was born on April 28th in Brünn, Moravia, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, now part of the Czech Republic.  Gödel was neither Czech nor Jewish. Although his parents had been born in Brünn, they were very much part of a German community. However, Gödel considered himself always Austrian in  exile in Czechoslovakia. Just before the outbreak of the second world war, Gödel moved permanently to the USA, where he worked at Princeton University.  Hungarian mathematician  John von Neumann (1903–1957) once wrote that Kurt Gödel was “absolutely irreplaceable” and “in a class by himself”. Describing his 1931 proof of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, von Neumann called the achievement as  "Singular and monumental — indeed it ...