Modern Mathematics
Lagrange has been considered a great universalist/polymath as his expertise spanned the pure and the applied disciplines of modern Mathematics, contributing to Group theory and paving the way for E. Galois (1811-1832) and N.H.Abel (1802-1829) proved the non-invertibility of the general quintic by radicals. This pursuit influenced the development of Mathematics through the quadratic inversion formula that was well known to the Greeks of antiquity by completing the square and by ingenious ruler and compass constructions. I wish I could now discuss Euclid and other Greeks of antiquity since my meanderings have led me to them, but alas, I am running out of space.
J. Lagrange (1736 – 1813), a very humble and extremely brilliant Italian Mathematician whom the French claimed as their own as he grew up in France. However, with the name Giuseppe Luigi Lagrangia, it would be difficult to claim he is French.
Great Minds in Military Conquests
Staying with Joseph for a while, he was chosen by Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1861) to accompany him on many of his conquests of war (not the famous and disastrous retreat from Russia), but one in particular I remember was the expedition to Egypt, where his expertise was used to help make cannons and catapults more accurate and have a larger range. There is nothing new in using the greatest minds to assist the military. We have, of course, the Manhattan Project led by Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), who had Richard Feynman (1918-1988) on his team (as the “number cruncher”), and he did this “odd job” as he put it whilst doing his PhD because he thought that the Germans were a danger.
The work conducted on this project also included the Italian “Giant” Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) of the fermions fame and of the Fermi problems (I would prefer to call this the Fermi method, that I am privileged to teach at UCL) led to the detonation of the A-bomb over Hiroshima in 1945. This project reminds of a quote by one of my three non-scientific heroes, namely Dr Martin Luther King Jr (1929-1968), the other two being Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) and John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963).
“We need leaders not in love with money but in love with justice. Not in love with publicity but in love with humanity.” Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
The Influence of Feynman
Returning to Feynman, I am especially thankful for his method of explaining things as I used his 3 volume masterpiece (The Feynman Lectures of Physics) to comprehend my university professors as a young Mathematics and Physics undergraduate. From that reading, one can easily deduce that Richard was a great fan of Ireland’s Sir Rowan William Hamilton (1805-1865) of the Hamiltonian and quaternion fame and P.A.M. Dirac (1902-1984), the creator of the relativistic Schrödinger (1887-1961) equation known today as the Dirac equation.
