bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Macfadyen D
Published: November 2023

Health professionals arc responsible for only a small proportion of the care given to elderly people. This applies to the whole range of care, from prevention to acute care, long-term care, and terminal care. The role of the professional carer is therefore enabling’, that is to say fortifying of family and friends in their caring roles so that they may perform their supporting tasks with knowledge, confidence, and skill. The knowledge which families have as a basis for providing care comes from a growing literature of self-health care materials produced largely by volunteer organizations or by specific family support groups. In developing countries, family and lay care are the predominant forms of care. Despite this, few simply written texts are available for use in a developing country situation.
Introduction
Authors: Macfadyen D
Published: November 2023

The most important single factor affecting the health of older people is the economic condition of elderly individuals. Other important factors are nutrition and the level of education, although there are less data on these. Marital status influences health: death of a spouse prejudices the health of the survivor.
Occupational health services and developing nations
Authors: Jeyaratnam J
Published: November 2023

Basically, the principles and the objectives for the provision of occupational health are universal, but what are usually variable are the administrative methods for the provision of such services and the extent of the services provided. The administrative process and the extent of occupational health services cover areas such as methods for the provision of services, organization and financing, legislation, the responsibilities of governmental and other agencies, the nature and extent of the administrative and technical supervision, the coverage for different groups of workers, the quality and quantity of coverage, and training and research facilities. To a great extent, the particular administrative pathway chosen for the delivery of occupational health services is in many instances historically determined–in such situations, even if the administrative system is not optimally efficient, it is relatively difficult to effect change. However, in countries where no occupational health services exist, or where the development of such services is relatively recent, it is possible that an administrative pathway considered to be most appropriate for the efficient delivery of occupational health services could be chosen. The responsibility for occupational health services basically devolves around (1) the state and (2) the private-sector organizations.
Migrant workers
Authors: El Batawi M A
Published: November 2023

People have always migrated from one region or country to another in search of food, water, and shelter. In modern times, migration to seek employment in another country has similar objectives–the attainment of better living and earnings. In the majority of cases, workers’ migration usually occurs when the country of the migrant is economically underprivileged compared to the host country. Workers select the host country in accordance with potential economic opportunity, favourable employment opportunities, and standard of living. On the other hand, there are needs in the affluent nations for workers to carry out jobs that are usually vacant or generally unacceptable to the national workforce.
The occupational-health nurse and primary health-care worker
Authors: Glass W I
Published: November 2023

The occupational-health nurse and the primary-care worker are two categories of health workers who have played and will continue to play an important and critical role in the network of health services (including occupational health) in all countries. However, as is often the case, the role and function of these two health workers is defined differently in different countries. In some situations an occupational-health nurse will be the primary health-care worker. In other situations the primary health-care worker will be seen as operating at a less skilled level.
Education and training in occupational health in developing countries
Authors: Phoon W O
Published: November 2023

It is generally accepted that education and training are corner-stones in the development of occupational health programmes in all countries. Until recently, however, several unwarranted assumptions have been commonly held in that vital area of occupational health activity. One such assumption was that education involved merely the transfer of information from teacher to student. Consequently, the curriculum in many occupational health courses became more and more crowded, especially since some teachers tended to think that the subjects they themselves taught were the most important and demanded an increasing number of hours.
Introduction to Geoffrey Bindman
Authors: Gardner John
Published: November 2023

Geoffrey Bindman’s name is well known to all of us who take an interest in the protection of human rights in the UK. A practicing solicitor who defies many of the popular preconceptions about his profession, he has played a prominent and progressive role in shaping several important areas of modern UK law (most notably the law relating to race and sex discrimination) and has acted, often to spectacular effect, in a number of land mark cases. As an unapologetic campaigner for human rights, one would expect to find Geoffrey Bindman working for the defence rather than the prosecution when he is involved in criminal cases. And that is indeed where one often finds him. But not always. In the famous Pinochet extradition proceedings, for example, he was retained by Amnesty International to help make the case in favour of extradition. As the work of human rights lawyers becomes more influential in legal and political culture, the people in the dock are increasingly going to be those who are charged with human rights violations rather than those who are victims of them. At which point one begins to find the human rights organizations, and their lawyers, working alongside the prosecutors and not only on the defence team.
Introduction to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Authors: Young Robert J C
Published: November 2023

There are plenty of academics in this world, but amongst them there is no one quite like Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak. She stands alone, unique. For many years now, in her lecturing and writing, Gayatri Spivak has challenged the accepted, the assumed, the expected. In her work, In Other Worlds (1987), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), she has contested the ways in which dominant power groups in many different fields represent the world, and assert their world, their perspectives, as the visible embodiment of humanity in general. Spivak’s theoretical work is at the same time exceptional in the ways in which it crushes theory against material circumstance, against the material inequality and deprivation which every day we silently consent to allow others to suffer.
Response to Bhabha
Authors: Taylor Charles
Published: November 2023

It would appear that Homi Bhabha and I are talking past each other. So it might be useful if I cleared up the misunderstanding before addressing his very interesting remarks.

The cross purposes seem to centre on the expression ‘partial milieux’, which I used in the Politics of Recognition and which he takes up. My use of this was in the context of the following argument: I think there is a presumption that human cultures that have animated societies across great stretches of time have something important to say to us. The context in which I make this point is obviously that in which people are tempted to make globalizing negative judgements. This is unfortunately our situation, as we can see, inter alia, from the current tendency to demonize Islam in much of the Western media and even educated opinion.
Class, History, and Capital
Authors: Wolff Jonathan
Published: November 2023

We have already seen a couple of contenders for Marx’s greatest soundbite: ‘religion is the opium of the people’; ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it’. Here is another, this time from the Communist Manifesto: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle’ (M. 246). Under capitalism, so Marx argues, society is resolving itself into the struggle between two classes: bourgeois and proletarian. The bourgeoisie are the capital owning, exploiting class, whereas the proletarian class are the workers.
The great stench
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Chemistry is commonly associated by outsiders with offensive smells, and there are undoubtedly chemical bouquets that cling tenaciously to hands and clothes. Professor W. H. Perkin, Jr was supposedly once turned off a bus in Manchester while returning home from the laboratory, where he had been working on odorift’rous amines. But there are tew stories to match the following, told by John Read [23], Professor of Chemistry at the Lniversity of Aberdeen.
Röintgen’s rays
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen was a respected, if not outstanding, experimental physicist, who in 1888 at the age of 43 was appointed professor and head of the physics institute at the University of Wlirzburg in Bavaria. This was at the time something of an academic backwater, but Rontgen, though essentially a loner, who preferred to work by himself, seems to have been an effective laboratory director and exerted himself to raise support and build up a good department. He was interested in electromagnetic radiation and set out to resolve the hotly contested question whether the recently discovered radiations, in particular the negatively charged cathode rays, should be regarded as particles or waves. (We now know that they partake of the character of both.) Here is how he came by his discovery, one of the most startling in the history of physics.
The first eureka
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Archimedes (287-212 BC) was a remarkable polymath—a scientist, inventor, and mathematician. He was a son of Syracuse and supposedly related to King Hieron II. Among his many practical inventions were a water snail (used to raise water for irrigation), the compound pulley, and several engines of war, which included the legendary burning glasses with which he was supposed to have destroyed the Roman invasion fleet as it approached his city.

One of Archimedes’s mathematical diversions was the ‘Sand Reckoner’, which facilitated the series of multiplications that allowed him to compute the number of grains of sand on the Sicilian coastline, and also the number that would fill the prevailing model of the universe (IO63 was the answer). According to Plutarch, he asked that at his death his grave should be marked by a sphere circumvented by a cylinder, with an inscription giving the difference between the volumes within and outside the sphere.
The unbreakable cypher
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Otto Frisch [20], the German physicist, was in Birmingham, England, at the beginning of the Second world war, preoccupied with the possibilities of achieving a nuclear fission bomb and denying the German side access to the Norwegian stocks of heavy water (deuterium oxide), which would be required for building such a weapon. A committee was set up to study the prospects, and this anecdote of Frisch’s illustrates the ovenvrought temper of the time.

The report which Peierls [another emigre physicist in Birmingham] [42] and I had sent to (Sir) Henry Tizard on Oliphant’s advice had triggered the formation of a committee, with (Sir) George Thomson [son of J. J., the discoverer of the electron] as chairman, which was given the code name ‘Maud Committee’. The reason for that name was a telegram which had arrived from Niels Bohr [79], ending with the mysterious words ‘AND TELL MAUD RAY KENT’. We were all convinced that this was a code, possibly an anagram, warning us of something or other. We tried to arrange the letters in different ways and came out with mis-spelt solutions like ‘Radium taken’, presumably by the Nazis, and ‘U and D may react’, meant to point out that one could get a chain reaction by using uranium in combination with heavy water, a compound of oxygen and the heavy hydrogen isotope called deuterium, abbreviated D. [Frisch does not mention that a cryptographer was enlisted to study the problem and came up with ‘Make Ur day nt’.] The mystery was not cleared up until after the war when we learned that Maud Ray used to be a governess in Bohr’s house and lived in Kent.
The success of the operation and the death of the patient
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

It was Francis Bacon (1561-1626) who was commonly credited with the first attempt to formulate a ‘scientific method’. To understand nature it was first necessary to purge the mind of preconceptions. Truth was to be sought by inductive reasoning, by maintaining rigorous scepticism, and devising experiments to test all inferences. It was Bacon’s dedication to the experimental approach that did for him in the end.

Francis Bacon was a wily politician, who was ennobled for his services to the Crown, but he attracted enemies, in part at least for his too-zealous investigations into the workings of nature—for ‘being too prying into the then receiv’d philosophy’, as Robert Hooke [63] later wrote. And so he fell from grace; accused of corruption, he was stripped of his public offices and banished from London. After the death of King James, Charles I relaxed the restrictions and permitted Bacon to visit London. On such an occasion one snowy day in March of 1626, Bacon was travelling in a coach with the King’s physician; the conversation turned to the effect of cold on the preservation of food. Could meat be preserved in ice as effectively as in salt? Bacon and his companion resolved to try an experiment: at Highgate, then a village north of London, they stopped the coach and purchased a chicken from a woman, who killed and gutted it. The two men stuffed the carcass with snow and packed it in more snow.
Ben Franklin stills the waves
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The voracious curiosity of Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) extended over all branches of science and much more besides. He had a special interest in what became known as surface forces and devised a favourite trick of waving his walking stick over a turbulent stream. The surface at once became smooth, for the stick was hollow and when shaken released a few drops of oil. Here is how his interest in the phenomenon was captured while he was en route for England as the diplomatic representative of the Assembly of the State of Pennsylvania.

In 1757, being at sea in a fleet of 96 sail bound against Louisbourg [in Nova Scotia], I observed the wake of two of the ships to be remarkably smooth, while all the others were ruffled by the wind, which blew fresh. Being puzzled with the differing appearance, I at last pointed it out to the captain, and asked him the meaning of it? ‘The cooks, says he, have, I suppose, been just emptying their greasy water through the scuppers, which has greased the sides of those ships a little;’ and this answer he gave me with an air of some little contempt, as to a person ignorant of what every body else knew. In my own opinion I at first slighted his solution, tho’ I was not able to think of another. But recollecting what I had formerly read in PLINY [28], I resolved to make some experiment on the effect of oil on water, when I should have the opportunity.
The quiet American
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

John Bardeen (1908-91) won two Nobel Prizes in physics—in 1956 and again in 1972. He was a large, serene man with a diffident manner and a soft voice. To the students who attended his lectures at the University of Illinois he was Whispering John. He shared his first Nobel Prize with two colleagues at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, one of them his lifelong friend, Walter Brattain, the other the head of the section, William Shockley. Bardeen, who had absorbed quantum mechanics during his days as a research student at Princeton, realized, when contemplating the behaviour of a semiconductor, that an electric current would undergo a disturbance at the interface between two microscopic crystalline regions. (A semiconductor has a conductivity for electricity between those of a conductor, such as a metal, and an insulator.) Such interfaces occur in crystals that contain impurities, and Bardeen’s theoretical analysis showed how the current density (the concentration of electrons) would change in this region. The result of this theory, and of the experiments guided by it, was the transistor.
Wrong experiment, right conclusion
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

During the apogee of atomic physics in the 1930s one of the movers of mountains was Ernest Orlando Lawrence (1901-58), who built at Berkeley in California, the first cyclotron-an instrument for accelerating charged particles, in general protons, along a spiral path. The protons attained unprecedentedly high speeds, sufficient often to split nuclei in a target on which they impinged. The early cyclotron was the precursor of the giant atom smashers of today, located in underground caverns miles across. Lawrence was a man of demonic energy and uncontrollable impatience. There were reasons to believe (correct, as it transpired) that deuterons-the nuclei of the recently discovered heavy hydrogen or deuterium, which contain a neutron in addition to the proton would be far more effective agents of destruction; Lawrence was accordingly consumed with the urgent desire to get his hands on some of this substance, which, as it happened, his colleague in the Chemistry Department, G. N. Lewis, was producing in the form of heavy water.
Polish and perish
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

In the early years of the twentieth century’ it became apparent to nutritionists that most foods contain trace substances essential for life. Casimir Funk [163], a Polish biochemist, gave them the name vitamines, from ‘vital amine’. It was a misnomer, for when the structures of several vitamins were determined they turned out not to be amines at all. The first of these substances to be discovered was what is now known as vitamin B,, or thiamine. It came to light through a happy accident.

Beri-beri is a degenerative condition, leading to early’ death. It lias ravaged populations throughout history’, and late in the nineteenth century an epidemic of the disease swept through the Dutch East Indies. In 1886, the Government in Holland despatched a small team of experts to investigate. Two were scientists, Clemens Winkler and Cornells Pekelharing by name, and they were accompanied by a young army doctor, Christiaan Eijkman (1858-1930). At this time the germ theory of disease, promulgated by the fathers of microbiology, Louis Pasteur [172] and Robert Koch [155], held sway, and the Dutchmen assumed that beri-beri was caused by a bacterial infection. For two years they toiled to isolate a bacterium and were finally persuaded that they had succeeded. Winkler and Pekelharing returned home, leaving Eijkman to conclude matters before joining them. But Eijkman grew uneasy. At the military hospital that was his base he had been working with chickens afflicted with what appeared to be the same disease, but all his efforts to transmit the supposed infection from sick or dead birds to healthy ones proved inconclusive. Indeed, even those isolated as normal controls fell sick. Nor did minute examination reveal any bacterium or parasite.
The way of the world
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

When George I ascended to the throne of England, he gave it as his greatest source of pride that Newton was now numbered among his subjects. Since those times science has become gradually more and more identified with national prestige. This has not been lost on the more politically aware scientific manipulators.

While American scientists during the Cold War became quite skilled in obtaining funds by sounding alarms about Soviet progress, there is evidence that their Soviet counterparts were not at all laggard in exploiting the Cold War to similar purpose. Thus, Representative Melvin Price [chairman of a congressional subcommittee on research and development) relates the following conversation with a Soviet physicist at the Dubna laboratory:

‘The Dubna Laboratory asked our group when we were there two years ago how we got the money to build our accelerators. We told him the legislative process of getting money on our program. He said, “That is not the way I understand.” He said, “1 understand you get it by’ saying the Russians have a 10-billion electron volt synchrotron and we need a 20-billion electron volt synchrotron and that is how you get your money.” I said, “There may be something to it.” I said, “How do you get your money?” He said, “The same way.”‘ Price related this tale to John Williams, director of the AEC research division, who commented, ‘That is certainly a very true story.’
Tug of war on the thread of life
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The discovery of the structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson was one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of science, made more so in Jim Watson’s own exuberant narrative. In 1952, Watson was 24 years old and a visiting research fellow in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. The experimental information that Watson and Crick had to guide them was exiguous, and they were aware that they were not alone in their pursuit of the structure. The effort at King’s College in London was impeded by the mutual antagonism between the protagonists, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin; the main competition, as Watson saw it, was from California, where resided the formidable Linus Pauling, by common consent the world’s pre-eminent structural chemist. By happy chance Watson was sharing an office with Pauling’s son, Peter, w’ho was a graduate student in the Cavendish. The talk, as Watson remembers it, was mainly about girls, but

A fetching face, however, had nothing to do with the broad grin on Peter’s face as he sauntered into the office one afternoon in the middle of December and put his feet up on the desk. In his hand was a letter from the States that he had picked up on his return to Peterhouse for lunch.
A Victorian tragedy, a twentieth-century sequel
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Philip Gosse was a nineteenth-century biologist, a respected figure, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who had struggled earnestly to come to terms with Darwin’s theory. He was also an outstanding popularizer of natural history in his writings and on the lecture podium. A severe figure of unbending Victorian rectitude, he had no time for frivolity and little even for his family. An entry in his diary reads: ‘Received green swallow from Jamaica. E. delivered of a son.’

As a Christian fundamentalist, a member of the austere Plymouth Brethren sect, Gosse was deeply troubled by the evident contradiction between the fossil record and biblical chronology. After years of agonizing, he arrived at a solution to this problem and some others thrown up by scientific discoveries, and in 1884 he published the fruits of his lucubrations in a book, which he called Omphalos, the ancient Greek for the navel. For one of Gosse’s preoccupations had been the thorny problem of whether Adam, who, unlike his descendants, was not born of woman, possessed this anatomical feature. The essence of Gosse’s theory was that God’s creation had been designed to embody the appearance of pre-existence. There was thus a true, or ‘diachronic’ time, and, in addition, God’s spurious, or ‘prochronic’ timescale, in which reposed the fossils that Gosse had so single-mindedly studied. The story of how the book was received is told by Gosse’s son, Edmund, the novelist and man of letters (and Philip’s only child, whose emergence into the world had received such a cryptic diary entry).
Chemistry in the kitchen: the discovery of nitrocellulose
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

In 1938, three days before Christmas, the young curator of the small East London Museum on the eastern seaboard of South Africa was assembling a display of fossils. Her name was Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer. That morning her work was interrupted by a telephone call from the harbour, where a trawler, laden with a catch that included sharks and other fish, had just docked. The trawlermen had supplied Miss Courtenay-Latimer with fish of many species for the museum’s collection. She now had a backlog of specimens from earlier catches still to be mounted and she wanted to get her fossil display finished before the Christmas holiday. She was not therefore anxious to accumulate more fish. ‘But 1 thought of how good everyone at Irvin and Johnson had been to me, and it being so near Christmas, I thought the least I could do would be to go down to the docks to wish them the compliments of the season.’
The virtues of squalor
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

The life and achievements of Alexander Fleming (1881-1955) have been obfuscated by the legends that gathered around him, even before his death. Fleming made two important but accidental discoveries, the second of which initiated a new era in medicine.

Fleming passed most of his working life in a dingy laboratory in St Mary’s Hospital close by Paddington railway station in London. His superior for much of that time was the redoubtable Professor Colonel Sir Almroth Wright—the model for Sir Colenso Ridgeon in George Bernard Shaw’s play, The Doctor’s Dilemma. Wright believed that the only valid weapon against bacterial infections (and many other medical problems) was immunization, and research on chemical intervention, which in the foregoing years had, thanks to the work of Paul Ehrlich [155] in Germany, already saved many lives, was strongly discouraged. It was indeed the Inoculation Department over which Wright so majestically presided. The methods favoured by Wright were highly conventional, even old-fashioned. The circumstances surrounding Fleming’s discovery of lysozyme, an enzyme that dissolves the cell walls of some kinds of bacteria, were recorded many years after the event (which occurred in 1921) by V. D. Allison, at the time a young research worker in Fleming’s laboratory:
The maestro’s gaffe
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961) was hailed as a mathematical and scientific genius from the beginning of his student years in Vienna. He was one of the small band of theoretical physicists who wrought a revolution in the perception of matter and the Universe in the years just before and after the First World War. Schrodinger’s most celebrated monument is the invention of wave mechanics, a description of the behaviour of fundamental particles, which he, with others, later showed to be the obverse of quantum mechanics. In 1927, he was elected, as successor to Max Planck, to a professorial chair at Berlin University, then the Mecca of theoretical physics. There he became closely associated with Albert Einstein, a friendship that endured intermittently, though with stormy vicissitudes, until a few years before Einstein’s death in 1955.
Charles Goodyear vulcanizes
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

It was early in the nineteenth century when Charles Macintosh and others first tried to produce waterproof materials by means of rubber coatings (whence, of rnurse, the macintosh). These efforts had mixed success: in hot weather the rubber would become sticky and run, and in mid weather crack. Charles Goodyear, born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1800, was reduced to penury by his long struggle to overcome this problem; he was forced, for instance, to write off a consignment of waterproofed mailbags, laboriously fabricated for the CS mail service, and spent no little time in debtors’ prisons.

Then in 1840 after he had unsuccessfully tried the effect, among many other materials, of sulphur on the rubber, he carelessly allowed a mixture of rubber and sulphur to come into contact with a hot stove. Instead of melting, the paste turned into a gummy mass, which only charred at the edges. Here is how his daughter described the moment:
As in a dream
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Francis Crick [88] has argued that the function of dreaming is to efface from our consciousness the miasma of redundant memory, the detritus of daily experience. This, he suggests, serves to bring the memories that matter into sharper focus. Perhaps, then, that is why dimly perceived, inchoate ideas have so often crystallized in the minds of great scientists in dreams or dream-like states of reverie. This, at all events, was how the classification of the chemical elements presented itself to Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev in his study in St Petersburg in 1869.

Mendeleyev was born in 1834 in a remote region of Siberia into a family of schoolteachers, the youngest of 17 children. He maintained in later life that he never fully mastered the Russian that was spoken in St Petersburg, where he was sent to study. There also, in the face of no little adversity, he became Professor of Chemistry at the Technological Institute. He appears in photographs as a patriarchal figure, wild of hair and heavily bearded. His command of detail and his capacity for work were legendary. It was his conviction that the chemical elements must conform to some all-embracing pattern. In this he was not alone, and indeed the concept for which he became famous had been prefigured—to general ridicule—by an English chemist by the name of John Newlands.
The wrath of fools
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Alexandre Dumas opined that rogues are always preferable to fools, for rogues sometimes take a rest. In the Soviet Union, with science in thrall to Marxist ideology, the fools held sway. Here is a story related by George Gamow [81], famous as a physicist and cosmologist, who eventually abandoned his native country’ for a brilliant career in the United States.

Gamow was a forthright character, a large man with a loud voice and an anarchic sense of humour. He and his student, Ralph Alpher, performed a seminal calculation, concerning the formation of elements at the birth of the Universe. True to form, he co-opted Hans Bethe [62], the great mathematical) physicist, to enlarge on aspects of this work, so that it could be published under the names of Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow. (Bethe’s name was apparently initially added without his knowledge, to his considerable displeasure, but his eventual contribution was important.) Gamow drew’ another colleague, Robert Herman, into this endeavour and tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade him to change his name to Delter.
The man of principle
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

J. E. (John Edensor) Littlewood (1885-1977) was one of the foremost mathematicians of the twentieth century. His absorption in his subject and his productivity persisted almost until his death. At the age of 89 Littlewood had a serious fall and entered a nursing home in Cambridge, where he appeared to lose all interest in life. A young friend, Béla Bollobás, visited him and tried to divert him with a new mathematical problem:

In my desperation I suggested the problem of determining the best constant in Burkholder’s weak L1 inequality (an extension of an inequality Littlewood had worked on). To my immense relief (and amazement), Littlewood became interested in the problem. He had never heard of martingales [who has?] but he was keen to learn about them so he was happy to listen to my brief explanation and was willing to read some introductory chapters! All this at the age of 89 and in bad health.
The stolen invention
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Dominique François Jean Arago [166] became, after his youthful adventures, a mandarin of the French scientific establishment and a force (for good) on the national political scene. He was a formidable power-broker in the Academy of Sciences and sought to ensure that it was the deserving who were elected to its membership, not, as often in the past, those with the most influential patronage. Arago on three successive occasions thwarted the aspirations of a hydraulic engineer, Pierre-Simon Girard, who was successfully opposed each time by Arago’s preferred candidate. All three of these had distinguished records and their names are commemorated in today’s textbooks. The second of them was the noted applied mathematician Simeon-Denis Poisson (immortalized in the Poisson ratio of elasticity and the Poisson distribution in statistics). He was nominated by the venerated physicist and mathematician Pierre Simon, marquis de Laplace, but his election presented a tricky political problem.
The heat of the light
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Wilhelm Friedrich Herschel, eventually Sir William, was born in 1738 in Hanover, the son of a musician, in whose profession he was trained. At the age of 19 he travelled to England and soon established himself as a composer, conductor, teacher, and church organist in Bath. In 1766, he began to take a deep interest in astronomy and before long had built his own reflecting telescope. For this purpose he ground his own mirrors, fashioned from speculum, an alloy of copper and tin. Every spare moment, even during the intervals of concerts, Herschel would hasten to his workshop to put in a little time on his mirrors. The Astronomer Royal of the day, Nevil Maskelyne, invited to examine Herschel’s telescope in Bath, pronounced it superior to any in London. Before long Herschel had made a series of discoveries, above all that of a new planet, Uranus. He wanted to call it Georgium in honour of George III, but this was vetoed by the Royal Society.

Herschel’s fame spread and soon the King summoned him to Windsor as his house astronomer. The two Hanoverians hit it off at once, and the King remained a faithful patron. During his career Herschel constructed at least 400 telescopes with his own hands. He searched the heavens and came upon many nebulae, which he rightly conjectured to consist of clusters of stars. He discovered two moons orbiting his planet, Uranus, and he was the first to observe the existence of double-stars—two stars conjoined in orbit about their common centre of mass.
A world of science in a teacup
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

R. A. (later Sir Ronald) Fisher was one of the founders of applied statistics. He devised methods, standard to this day, of analysis of biological data and of design of such undertakings as clinical trials of drugs. Fisher was born in north London in 1890 and in 1910 he began his research career at the Rothamsted Experimental Station near London, then and still a centre of agricultural research. Four years earlier the life of the laboratory had been enriched by the arrival of its first female staff member, Muriel Bristol, an authority on algae. It was out of consideration for her that the custom of afternoon tea in the com mon-room was initiated.

One day, soon after his arrival at Rothamsted, Fisher courteously handed Dr Bristol a cup of tea, which, however, she declined, protesting that she preferred the milk to be added to the tea, rather than the tea to the milk. (This fine distinction was long seen as a shibboleth of English social class.) Fisher was astonished: surely she, as a scientist, could not believe that it made any difference to the taste. But Dr Bristol insisted: she could certainly tell the difference. Fisher decided to put the matter to the test with a blind tasting, and he and william Roach, a chemist at the laboratory, devised a trial. The question was resolved in Dr Bristol’s favour: she could indeed tell the difference (though with what statistical certainty is not recorded). It was this episode that caused Fisher to ponder the general principles of statistical evaluation, which culminated in his magisterial treatise, Statistiml Methods for ReseMch Workers, published in 1925.
A copper or two
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Rudolf Schoenheimer was a German biochemist of exceptional accomplishment. As a Jew, he lost his position in Germany before the Second World War and found refuge, along with many others in the same predicament, in the medical school of Columbia University in New York. There the Head of the Biochemistry Department, Hans Thatcher Clarke, assembled a brilliant, polyglot, and captious galère of Europeans.

The years immediately after the war saw a succession of remarkable advances in the chemistry of physiological processes, thanks in large part to the advent of radioactive isotopes [149]; it was now possible to render radioactive, and thus label, substances involved in metabolism and follow their chemical transformations in a cell or in an animal. But radioactive isotopes were still in short supply and precious. Schoenheimer wanted to experiment with radioactively labelled urea, the metabolic end-product excreted by animals and man. A leader in the field of isotope purification was Harold Urey, who agreed to make available to Schoenheimer a minute quantity of ammonium nitrate, greatly enriched in the isotope of nitrogen with an atomic weight of 15, which makes up only a vanishingly small proportion of the Earth’s nitrogen, with its atomic weight of 14. Urey had prepared the material from bulk ammonium nitrate, a dangerous, explosive chemical, which he had illicitly driven into New York from a plant in New Jersey through the Holland Tunnel in the rumble-seat of his coupe. The glass ampoule, which he presented to Schoenheimer, contained the bulk of the world’s supply of the purified isotope, N.
The case of the flaccid ears
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Lewis Thomas was a distinguished medical scientist, who became the head of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York, and achieved wider fame for his collections of lucid and elegant essays on science, medicine, and related subjects. One of his first adventures in research occurred in 1936 when he was an ambitious medical student. Thomas had become intrigued by something called the Shwartzman phenomenon. The eponymous researcher had observed that when a rabbit’s skin was injected with bacterial endotoxin (a rather mildly toxic secretion from certain bacteria), the only result was a little local inflammation; yet when the process was repeated, though only within the very narrow time interval of 18-24 hours, extensive skin lesions and haemorrhages ensued. If the second dose of toxin was injected into a vein nothing happened, but when both injections were intravenous the result was catastrophic, culminating in destruction of the kidneys.
The flat-earther’s revenge
Authors: Gratzer Walter
Published: November 2023

Alfred Russel Wallace was a passionate naturalist, whose long life stretched from 1823 to the eve of the Great War in 1913. He spent his early years exploring the wildlife in remote corners of the world from Sarawak to the Amazon. He pondered the nature of speciation, and the concept of natural selection crystal lized in his mind as he lay shivering, too weak to move, in the grip of a malarial fever.

Darwin, who had been toiling for many years at his mighty work, 011 the Origin of Species, was shocked to find the essential principles of his grand conception prefigured in a paper, which wallace dispatched in 1858 from his base on a Malayan island. Danvin sought reassurance from his friends: could he, having read Wallace’s manuscript, now honourably publish an abstract of his own, which he would otherwise not have done? He wrote to his friend and supporter, the geologist Charles Lyell, of his mortification at his own ‘trumpery feelings’. ‘I would far rather’, his letter concluded, ‘burn my whole book than that he or any man should think I had behaved in a paltry spirit.’ But Wallace was a humble man, who recognized Danvin’s genius, and was happy with the accommodation that was quickly reached: an abstract, or ‘sketch’ of Darwin’s theory would be read, together with Wallace’s offering, at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London. Wallace was content henceforth to appear as ‘the Moon to Darwin’s Sun’.
Learning, Literature, And Art
Authors: Poole Austin Lane , Litt D
Published: November 2023

The century which saw the recovery of the works of Aristotle, the real beginning of scholasticism, the rise of the universities, the age of Abailard and Gratian, may properly be termed a renaissance, an intellectual revolution which marks an era in the history of learning and education. Education in the middle ages was wholly the province of the church, and was primarily intended for the training of the clergy. It was controlled by the bishop or his deputy, the chancellor or magister scholarum without whose licence no one could teach or open a school. Unlicensed or ‘adulterine’ schools were ruthlessly sup pressed by the bishops. Although the canon law required a parish priest to provide instruction in singing and reading the psalter, we can scarcely credit the statement of Theobald of Etampes, who was teaching at Oxford in the early years of the twelfth century, that there were experienced schoolmasters (peritissimi scholarum magistri) not only in cities but even in villages (in villulis). There were, however, attached to cathedrals, the larger monasteries, and collegiate churches, besides the elementary song schools (scholae de cantu), also grammar schools.3 Grammar was the first and the most vital of the liberal arts, for it comprised not only the rules of grammar studied in the textbooks of Donatus and Priscian, but also classical literature or philology.
Creativity out of chaos: Poetry between the death of Caesar and the death of Virgil
Authors: Morgan Llewelyn
Published: November 2023

The last survivor of the New Poets, Cinna, died in the violent aftermath of Julius Caesar’s funeral. His cries of ‘I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet’ (according to Shakespeare’s version) were of no avail, and his death is emblem atic. Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 ushered in the most murderous period of the Roman civil wars, and neither poets nor poetry were exempt. But despite the general chaos-or more accurately in direct response to it, and in an attempt to make sense of it-this period also witnessed a creative efflorescence in Roman literature such as had never been seen before. Some of the greatest poets in the Latin language began their careers in this, the darkest period of Roman history. In particular, the years immediately after the death of Caesar formed the context for the first major work by Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 BCE: styled ‘Virgil’ by Christian commentators by association with the word ‘virgin’), the greatest of all Roman poets.
Powers of horror and laughter: The great age of drama
Authors: Wilson Peter
Published: November 2023

When the tragic flower first blossomed in Attic soil late in the sixth century it represented a major innovation on the horizon of Greek poetry and society. For the first time the familiar figures of myth—the men, women, and gods sung of by the Homeric bard and his successors—had miraculously come to life. They moved and interacted as real physical presences before the eyes; they spoke and sung directly to the ear of the audience; the new technology of the theatrical mask and costume introduced the possibility of total impersonation. A unique set of circumstances had produced a radically new kind of performance, and with it the first fully theatrical audience.
Disney ‘s Rivals,1928-1937
Authors: Barrier Michael
Published: November 2023

In February 1928, just before Walt Disney ‘s confrontation with Charles Mintz in New York, Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising finally agreed to sign one-year employment contracts with Mintz. Harman was to be production manager, with broad authority (that would not, however, extend to salaries). Ising and George Winkler began equipping a studio at 1154 North Western Avenue in Hollywood, in the same space that Harman and Ising rented briefly in 1926 when they made Aladdin ‘s Vamp.2 Even after they agreed orally to work for Winkler Pictures, though, Harman and Ising did not give up trying to win their own release: late in February they unsuccessfully approached Paramount.3 Since Mintz was still trying to bring Disney to heel, he as well as Harman and Ising had good reason to put off signing a contract until mid-March, after Mintz had finally broken with Disney. Friz Freleng returned from Kansas City to join the new studio ‘s staff, and production got under way in early May, after Harman and Rollin Hamilton left the Disney payroll.
UPA,1944-1952
Authors: Barrier Michael
Published: November 2023

By 1942, men from every Hollywood cartoon studio were entering the military. Most of those new soldiers, whether draftees or volunteers, did not go into combat units but were put to work instead on animated training films. The Army Signal Corps had established its first small animation unit in the middle thirties,1 and some World War II draftees from the animation industry went to Signal Corps studios in New York City and at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. The Signal Corps was, however, locked into a kind of animated filmmaking that relied heavily on instructional diagrams; the Hollywood draftees who wound up in New York or Dayton were simply absorbed into that system.
Old Leftists, New Leftists, and Lumpen-Logocrats: The Radical Fringes
Authors: Derber Charles , Schwartz William A , Magrass Yale
Published: November 2023

Some professionals really are subversive. In the United States and Europe over the past hundred years, they have been both foot soldiers and leaders in radical movments. The dreams of both the Old Left and the New Left have been, to a surprising degree, radical professionals’ dreams. Some advocate a centrally planned society; they include Old Leftists and the Communist class of planners in Eastern Europe challenged in the revolutions of 1989. Members of the New Left recoil from centralized authority and support participatory democracy or anarchism.
Questions of Equity
Authors: Kessler-Harris Alice
Published: November 2023

In the spring of 2000, the Republican congressional leadership proposed, and Congress unanimously passed, a revision of the nation’s Social Security code that lifted restrictions on earnings for people under the age of seventy. The new law allowed every contributor over the age of sixty-five to receive a full old age pension regardless of whether he or she continued to earn wages. Exuberant praise and congratulatory public comments greeted this expansion of benefits in one of the country’s most beloved social programs. This, said the New York Times, “is one of those exceptional government initiatives that hardly anyone faults publicly,” and it quoted a reigning lobbyist to the effect that it was “good labor policy, good social policy and good economic policy.”1 The twenty-two-billion-dollar price tag, commentators noted with satisfaction, would be recouped after barely a decade—offset by a technical change that rescinded higher benefits to those between sixtyfive and seventy who remained in the workforce. This bill was not about money; it was about a new consensus, forged during a time of labor shortages, to encourage the elderly to stay at work longer. Yet it cogently invoked a concept of fairness that no one involved in the original Social Security Act would have recognized.