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Mar. 15, 2007 If you study physics, mathematics, chemistry and similar topics, you will find that a great many phenomena, procedures and units of measure are named after famous European scientists of the past, for example, Newton's laws of motion, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle or Riemannian geometry. Actually, I am not much interested in this aspect of the matter. I am more interested in understanding the laws and principles than in celebrating the exploits of distinguished deceased professors and scholars. But that's the way the subjects are usually taught. The average collage textbook may even have hypertextual mini-biographies of Galileo, Cantor, Volta, etc., for the perusal of the more historically-minded students. So, willy-nilly, if you belabor yourself over the explanations and problems in your courses, you will gain familiarity with the names of dozens of scientists and mathematicians from the 19th and earlier centuries. The 20th century trickledown of names is not yet complete, so let me just skip it, concerning myself with those earlier ones. By around 1985, I hadn't been able to help noticing that apparently the vast majority of European names were those of just four nationalities: French, German, English and Italian. I am deliberately excluding Asiatic groups from consideration, since, because of vast linguistic barriers, distinguished scientists who may have been celebrated at home were not celebrated in the world at large. Who knows that Liu Pang invented paper, for example? Who has ever heard of Avicenna, an Islamic medical inventor and scholar? However, among Frenchmen I can think of who left their names in the history of science were Ampere, Cauchy, Coulomb, Fourier, Laplace, Lavoisier, Lebesgue, Lagrange, Lesseps, Fresnel, St. Venant, Curie, Poisson, Poincaré and many others. Among Englishmen, or at least men with English names, were Newton, Watt, Joule, Faraday, Wheatstone, Davy, Green, Priestley, Maxwell, Cavendish. Briggs, Napier, Taylor, Stokes, Gibas and others. Among noted scientists with German names were Gauss, Leibniz, Riemann, Planck, Ohm, Weber, Siemens, Cantor, Helmholz, Heisenberg, Hilbert, Einstein, Kronecker, Weierstrass, Lorenz, Kraft-Ebbing, Freíd. The German list, of course, includes Jews with German names, but I have never checked them one by one to see who's who, for, as I say, I'm more interested in the scientific rather than the biographical information. And among Italian names we find da Vinci, Galileo, Bernoulli, Levi-Cività, Volta, Marconi, Galvani and others. Now and then you find a name or two from some other nationality, for example, Tesla, who was Serbian, Copernicus, who was Polish, Bohr, who was Danish, Mendel, who was Bohemian, and some others. There have been more Russians, like Mendeleev, Lobachevski and Lomonocov. However, search though you may, you will never find a Hispanic name of true stature in science. Even though I had observed this dearth myself earlier on, about 5 years ago I argued in defense of Spanish scientists against a Cuban who was maintaining the same thing I had already concluded: the fewness of Spanish scientists. But taking the defense on this subject is a losing cause, for you won't be able to produce any examples at all to give evidence of your case. This is not to say that there were not a great number of Spanish explorers and conquerors, and a fair number of writers, painters and musicians. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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