Thomas Fincke und die <Emphasis Type="Italic">Geometria rotundi</Emphasis>

Thomas Fincke (January 6^th, 1561–April 24^th, 1656), born in Flensburg (Germany), was one of the very most important and significant scientists in Denmark during the seventeenth century, a mathematician and astrologer and physician in the beginning of modern science, a representative of humanism and an influentual academic organizer. He studied in Strasbourg (since 1577) and Padua (since 1583) and received his M.D. in Basel (1587), he practised as a physician throughout his life (since 1587 or 1590) and became a professor at Copenhagen (1591). But he was best known because of his Geometriae rotundi libri XIIII (1583), a famous book on plane and spherical trigonometry, based not on Euclid but on Petrus Ramus. In this influentual work, in which Fincke introduced the terms tangent and secant and probable first noticed the Law of Tangents and the so-called Newton-Oppel-Mauduit-Simpson-Mollweide-Gauss-formula, he showed himself to be „abreast of the mathematics of his time“.      

Ermakov album

Abstract

When I first met Henry Ries in his home in Manhattan in the mid-1980s, I was struck by his generosity in telling me about his career. Born in 1917 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf in an assimilated Jewish family, Henry (born Heinz) Ries left for New York on 13 January 1938. Initially, he found employment in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he taught photography at the Jewish community centre and could use their laboratory for his own work. He tried to enlist in the United States Army in December 1941, but this was not possible, since he was an 'enemy alien' and a recent emigrant without American citizenship. In May 1943, he joined the Army Air Corps and received American citizenship. Initially posted to the Pacific theatre, making aerial photographs of China for the 20th Bomber Command, he subsequently transferred to the European theatre, arriving in London in late May 1945. Assigned to the ‘Office Director of Intelligence’, his first job was to evaluate Heinrich Himmler's ‘secret state library’ correspondence with the SS, Hitler, Goebbels, Goring, and others, which was later utilized in the Nuremberg Medical Trial. Three months later, Ries was transferred to Berlin.     

The Putto with the camera; photography as a fine art

Abstract

The putto, best known since antiquity in his role as the puerile companion of Venus, returned to art, after an eclipse during the middle ages, in a multiplicity of guises during the Renaissance. Although he was often called upon to playa part in serious allegories, it was his amorous and playful nature as well as his adaptability that later endeared him to the courtly world of the rococo. One of his most popular roles in the 18th century was the personification of the arts and sciences. Armed with a square, a musical instrument, a chisel or palette and brushes, he quickly became the emblematic yet charming incarnation of architecture, music, sculpture or painting¹. The number of examples of this type of putto is legion, and its creators include such illustrious painters as van Loo and Boucher (Figure 1).     

On Supramolecular Polymerization: Interview with Takuzo Aida

Prof. Takuzo Aida is one of the most visible materials chemists thanks to his many creative contributions to the broad field of supramolecular chemistry. Over the past two decades he has ingeniously utilized self-assembly across scales and between various components to access a breathtaking variety of complex materials with fascinating properties. For example, the Aida Lab has pioneered conducting “bucky gel” by dispersing carbon nanotubes in ionic liquids as well as “aqua materials”, in which a tiny amount of additive renders water mechanically robust. From his personal insight he shares in this Interview, we can learn how his research evolved since his undergraduate studies. Moreover, he shares his vision on the importance of supramolecular polymers (Supra-Plastics) to realize a sustainable society.     

Über die Variationsrechnung in Hilberts Werken zur Analysis

The paper deals with some of the developments in analysis against the background of Hilbert's contributions to the Calculus of Variations. As a starting point the transformation is chosen that took place at the end of the 19th century in the Calculus of Variations, and emphasis is placed on the influence of Dirichlet's principle. The proof of the principle (the “resuscitation”) led Hilbert to questions arising in the 19th and 20th problems of his famous Paris address in 1900: theexistence in a generalized sense, and theregularity of solutions of elliptic partial differential equations. By this new concept Hilbert pointed out two very important issues the history of which is closely tied up with the rise of modern analysis. Further on, Hilbert'stheorem of independence of the Calculus of Variations, an important contribution to its formal apparatus as well as to its field theory, is briefly discussed. But even as Hilbert published his first essential results, he was turning his attention to another area of mathematics that differs in an important respect from the Calculus of Variations:integral equations. Hilbert did so because he recognized that in this branch by its flexibility he was coming closer to his goal of an unifying methodological approach to analysis.     

Horatio Ross presentation album

Abstract

Horatio Ross (1801–1886)¹ was an aristocrat whose enthusiasm for photography was second only to his passion for nature, Scottish culture and sport. Born at Rossie Castle, Forfarshire, on 5 September, 1801, Ross was named in honour of his godfather, Lord Horatio Nelson, Napoleon's boldest foe, and an intimate friend of his father. At the age of 18, he joined that gallant regiment, His Majesty's 14th Light Dragoons from which he retired in 1826 with the rank of Captain. Ross served as a Member of Parliament with integrity and honour between May 1831 and December 1834, representing the boroughs of Aberdeen and Montrose, and played a prominent role in debates concerning agriculture and game laws. In December 1834, Ross married Justine Henrietta, whose father was chief of the MacRae clan of Ross-shire. Their happy union of more than 50 years produced five sons: Horatio Stefenberg John, Hercules, Colin, Edward (Ned), and Robert Peel.     

Zur Rezeption von Hallers medizinischem und medizinhistorischem Werk im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert

A survey of the secondary literature of Albrecht Haller’s medical work after his death (1777) reveals that already in the 19th century most of his topics and his method were discussed and appreciated. Within physiology his doctrine of irritability and sensibility received most attention. The 20th century shows a considerable expansion of the secondary literature. However, there is still a lack of monographs dealing with Haller’s medical work in a comprehensive way. Not only was the appreciation of Haller’s medical work in the more than 200 years since his death constantly high but, for whatever reasons, it is even characterized by an increasing interest of researchers from many fields.     

Maxwell and the science of colour

This non-technical review of Maxwell's contributions to the quantitative theory of colour was presented at a symposium in Aberdeen to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his appointment as professor of natural philosophy at Marischal College. Maxwell maintained his interest in the science of light and colour from his childhood to the last decade of his life. He lavished the same care and imagination on these studies as he did on his epochal contributions to electromagnetism and statistical physics.     

Medical ethics in the clinical context -- a new concept by the physician Richard C. Cabot]

Richard C. Cabot was a professor of medicine and philosophy at Harvard University. He developed a very practical system of medical ethics structured by the hospital, its patients and care givers. Clearly he differentiated between a concept from an inside perspective and a concept born from an outside perspective. Thus, he opposed to the orientation to ethical codes which the American Medical Association established since 1847 (the outside perspective). The code-tradition was oriented by principles without professional context, while Cabot focused his concept of ethics rather on duty, which can not be reflected without its context (the inside perspective). This paper displays the essentials of his concept of ethics: 1) communication as the substantial core of medicine, 2) the basis in cases, 3) the multi/-interdisciplinarity, 4) the focus on the structure of therapy, i.e. care giving, 5) the respect of the patient, and 6) the obligation by truth.     

Philip Werner Baumeister (1929-2003): in memoriam

Philip Baumeister pioneered the design of optical thin films by computer methods. He has published many important papers on various aspects of optical coatings, and he initiated the Optical Society of America's Topical Meetings on Optical Interference Coatings. Most important, during his time at the University of Rochester and thereafter, he trained and mentored generations of researchers and engineers in the theory and practice of thin-film interference coatings. Originally, a talk was prepared to celebrate his 75th birthday at the ninth Topical Meeting on Optical Interference Coatings. Because of his untimely demise on 22 October 2003, it was presented at the conference to honor his memory. This is a written version of the tribute that contains a comprehensive list of Philip Baumeister's various publications.     

Paul Konitzer (1894–1947): Hygieniker,Amtsarzt, Sozialmediziner,Gesundheitspolitiker

Paul Konitzer was one of the outstanding and well-known physicians in the years after the World War II in East-Germany. THe paper describes his professional way as hygienist, social medical, municipal physician and last but not least as health politician in the times of four different political regimes: the imperial era in Germany till 1918, the time of "Weimarer Republic" till 1933, the Nazi dictatorship till 1945 and the early years in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. The life of Konitzer is a typical example of the fate of a German doctor in the first half of the 20th century. Konitzer was arrested in February 1947 by the Soviet Military Government in Berlin in connection with some political troubles and reproach with a typhus epidemic in a German camp for Russian Prisoners of War in the Nazi era. On April 22nd 1947 he died in prison of Dresden by suicide without condemnation.     

Samuel Bourne of Nottingham

Abstract

Samuel Bourne was one of the great pioneers of travel photography, and the photographs which he took in India during the 1860s have become familiar to a wide audience through their inclusion in exhibitions, their use as book illustrations and also through television coverage. Although acknowledging the merit of that aspect of his work, this paper discusses the hitherto comparatively little-known role which he played in the arena of photography during the period immediately before he went to India, and also his activities in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries.     

Bonfils & Son,Egypt, Greece and the Levant; 1867–1894

Abstract

Félix Bonfils was born in Saint Hippolyte du Fort, France, on 6th March 1831. Little is known of his early life. Family sources indicate he began his professional career by operating his own printing press¹. On becoming interested in photography, he produced photographs using the heliogravure process invented by Niépce. In due course, he adopted the collodion wet-plate process, with all its well-known complications and encumbrances. For the landscape photographer lie was to become, the task of moving his equipment from place to place must have been formidable, especially in countries where roads and transport were meagre.     

Rudolph Clausius – A pioneer of the modern theory of heat

Rudolph Clausius (1822–1888) played an important role in advancing the theory of heat during the 19th century. His contributions concerned the development of the two fundamental principles of heat as well as the microscopic approach of kinetic theory where he introduced the new concept of the mean free path. He always strictly separated these two fields. When Clausius took up his studies the idea that heat belonged to the so-called imponderables which were weightless and invisible had not yet disappeared. Carnot had still used that idea for his well-known cycle. Clausius was able to make the Carnot-cycle compatible with the concept of heat as a kind of motion.His research opened the way for thermodynamics later chiefly advocated by Planck as well as for modern statistical physics mainly connected with the names of Maxwell and Boltzmann. Scientific education and research of Clausius will be discussed here in the context of the development of the theory of heat. As he published most of his important papers on this subject already during the first two decades of his career we confine on this period. Clausius began his studies in Berlin in 1840, habilitated there in 1850 and was appointed at the newly founded Polytechnical School in Zürich in 1855. It will be shown that Clausius remained an outsider in the physics community of his time as he himself did not perform any research experiments.     

Photographs in the Janos Scholz Collection

Abstract

Janos Scholz (1903–1993), who was to become one of the great cellists of the twentieth century, began collecting when he was a child in Sopron, Hungary. After completing his studies at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Music, Scholz was named first cellist with the Budapest Symphony Orchestra. In 1932 he joined the Roth Quartet, and the following year he left Hungary to tour with the quartet in the United States. He became an American citizen in 1933 and made his home in New York until his death in 1993. Scholz began to collect prints and drawings in 1935 and over the next three decades he amassed an unrivalled collection ofItalian drawings. In keeping with the nature of his life as a musician, in which he shared his music through public recitals, Scholz announced in 1973 that he had decided to give his drawings to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Soon afterwards he began a new collection, one that focused upon nineteenth-century European photographs on paper.     

A Serpent without Teeth. The Conservative Transformism of Jean‐Baptiste d’Omalius d’Halloy (1783–1875)

Abstract Historians dealing with evolutionary theory in the period between the death of Jean‐Baptiste Lamarck (in 1829) and the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (in 1859) have mainly focussed on evolutionist radicals who were, for the most part, working at the margins of mainstream science. This essay, however, wants to indicate that in the same time period, a more moderate (even conservative) transformism was developed in the well‐respected centres of scientific debate. It does so by concentrating on the intellectual trajectory of the Belgian Jean‐Baptiste d’Omalius d’Halloy, not only a geologist of European reputation but also a noted conservative and catholic aristocrat. On the basis of previously unused archival material, this essay researches how d’Omalius developed his evolutionist ideas, starting from the lessons he took with Lamarck in the beginning of the 19th century and ending with the last transformist publications he published as a 90‐year‐old in the 1870s. Furthermore, the essay analyses how d’Omalius adapted Lamarck’s transformist ideas to his personal worldview and looks at the tactics he used to open a space for the evolution debate. In this way, it shows a largely unknown aspect of the transforming of transformism in mid‐19th‐century science.     

The Poet's Pose

Abstract

In July of 1868, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was on his fourth and final tour of Europe. He had become a literary lion in the grand tradition of the 19th century and enjoyed the kind of reverential celebrity that is now nearly out of style. It was obligatory that he visit with Dickens and Tennyson, and he duly did so. On the 17th or 18th of July 1868, during one of his several visits to Tennyson's house at Farringford on the Isle of Wight, he was taken by Tennyson to be photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron. Tennyson, along with others among his contemporaries, was aware that the strange woman who took such pains with her photographs and who tyrannized her sitters might be something of a genius. Longfellow was probably just mystified. In a famous quotation, Tennyson abandoned Longfellow to her tender mercies: ‘I will leave you now, Longfellow. You will have to do whatever she tells you. I will come back soon and see what is left of you’¹. Of what was left we cannot be sure, but the photograph that was taken was of an angry old man, with a head resembling the crest of a stormy wave; emotional, strong, raw, and indisputably great. A later critic speculated on a century that could allow men to grow into that special mould of greatness so evident in their very look, and we may also speculate on how they found the photographers who could mirror them so well.     

Benjamin Robins (1707–1751): Opting not to be a commissary for Acadia but a fortifications engineer in East India

After the printing of his little “budget”‡ of New Principles of Gunnery in 1742 [1,2], Robins would seem to have become unsure as to what and where he should apply his talents. Not obtaining a permanent appointment as Professor of Fortification at the Woolwich Military Academy in 1741, his search for self-esteem in employment seems to have led him to accept the post, in 1749, of Director General of Engineering for the East India Company in the Carnatica, India, and where at work in 1751, he died of malaria one year after landing from England.

The paper describes some of the historical and technical background, e.g. of the military engineer and the establishment of some fortifications by the British in the 17th and 18th centuries on the eastern side of the Indian subcontinent, at the start of less than two centuries of subsequent Empire. Some account of one Western European nation's involvement in overseas military engineering is outlined; we do not restrict this only to Robins' period but indicate how it continued and developed for a generation after he died. Robins' decease at the height of his career in early middle age, surely cut by one half a great career of unfulfilled promise in engineering science and practice.

Originally, as a consequence of the signing of the terms of the peace treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, after the War of the Austrian Succession, Robins was offered the opportunity to go to Paris, “as a commissary to set the limits of Acadia”. This he declined, choosing rather to go out East.

English mid-18th century sensitivity to events in Acadia is fully described. The contest between the English and French for Empire in Southern India and Nova Scotia is described (relatively) extensively and reveals the depth of competition between the nations. Details pertaining to Acadia are given in Part I and to India in Part II.     

Christian Tuxen Falbe and the Pioneer Daguerreotypists in Denmark

Abstract

The Danish officer, archaeologist and numismatist Christian Tuxen Falbe (1791 - 1849) was born in Elsinore and educated as an officer in the Danish Navy. He served in the French Navy from 1808 - 10 and became a commander in the Royal Danish Navy, but was dismissed in 1820 and appointed Consul General in Tunisia where he remained for the next ten years. In Tunisia, he surveyed the ancient site of Carthage, and later published his results in Paris (Recherches sur l'emplacement de Cartage 1833). During his service in Tunisia, Falbe corresponded for years with the Danish Crown Prince Christian Frederik (1796 - 1848) (since 3 December 1839 King Christian VIII) and between the two men strong bonds developed based on their common interests in antiquity, inventions, painting, coins and culture of foreign countries. In 1833 Falbe was appointed as Danish Consul General to Nauplia and Athens in Greece, but was recalled in August 1835. Falbe thereafter spent a short period in Copenhagen, where he arranged the private collection of coins and antiquities belonging to the Crown Prince. In 1837 The Society for Research into Carthage was established in Paris and in the same year Falbe set out on a scientific expedition with Sir Grenville Tempe (1798 –1847) as head.