Special Cover on Alan Turing’s Centenary

 

June 23, 2012, is the Centenary of Alan Turing’s birth in London. During his relatively brief life, Turing made a unique impact on the history of computing, computer science, artificial intelligence, developmental biology, and the mathematical theory of computability.

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Bletchley Park puts its stamp on Turing Centenary.

On 23^rd February Bletchley Park will release four first day covers celebrating Alan Turing’s centenary year. Each will carry a single 1^st class Royal Mail “Turing Bombe” stamp cancelled with a unique first day of issue postmark.

The intention is to restrict the issue to just 500 of each. Produced in association with the Alan Turing Centenary Year Committee and Bletchley Park Post Office, proceeds will go towards supporting the preservation of Bletchley Park. The cover  can be previewed and ordered at bletchleycovers.com

The first design is by Rebecca Peacock of Firecatcher Design and the theme is Turing’s work on the mathematics of patterns. It was Turing’s genius for mathematics that made his work so vital to Bletchley Park and the development of modern computing.

The other three are original paintings by artist Steve Williams who has donated his work to Bletchley Park. They depict three buildings at Bletchley Park associated with Alan Turing. These are the cottage and hut where he worked and the room that housed the Bombe machines.

The stamp features a rebuilt Turing Bombe. The first day of issue postmark is a facsimile of one of the Bombe’s 36 rotor wheels.

More information can be obtained on the issue through bletchleycovers.com or calling 0044 (0)1908 363489 or   Terry Mitchell, 01604 781440. email: terry@ltmp.co.uk

 

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New Stamp from India..

 

Srinivasa Ramanujan – Greatest Mathematician

Date of Issue : 26 December 2011

India Post issues  second time, a postage stamp on Srinivasa Ramanujan .

 

Stamp Image: Courtesy – Mansoor B., Mangalore

 

India Post issued a commemorative postage stamp on 75th Birth Anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan  on 22 December 1962.

Born: 22 Dec 1887 in Erode, Tamil Nadu
Died: 26 April 1920 in Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu

 

Special Cover on Srinivasa Ramanujan : 37th International Olympiad Mumbai, India 1996

Ramanujan's birthday will be National Mathematics Day

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday emphasised the need to carry forward the legacy of great mathematicians such as Srinivasa Ramanujan, Aryabhata and Brahmagupta so as to encourage and nurture the glorious tradition of the country in mathematics.

Inaugurating the Ramanujan Centre for Higher Mathematics at the Alagappa University here, he said mathematics had been widely used in the study of Science and other disciplines.

The country was short of competent mathematicians and it was the responsibility of mathematical community to encourage and facilitate the study of mathematics as an academic discipline in the country, the Prime Minister said.

Paying tribute to Srinivasa Ramanujan, Dr. Singh said he was a legendary mathematician after whom the centre had been named. He was a great son of India and Tamil Nadu. He ranked among giants in the world of mathematics. In recognition of his contribution to mathematics, the Central government had decided to celebrate Ramajuan's birthday as the National Mathematics Day every year and declared 2012 as the National Mathematical Year.

 

Srinivasa Ramanujan was one of India's greatest mathematical geniuses. He made substantial contributions to the analytical theory of numbers and worked on elliptic functions, continued fractions, and infinite series.

Ramanujan was born  in Erode, a small village about 400 km southwest of Madras.

When he was nearly five years old, Ramanujan entered the primary school in Kumbakonam although he would attend several different primary schools before entering the Town High School in Kumbakonam in January 1898. At the Town High School, Ramanujan was to do well in all his school subjects and showed himself an able all round scholar. In 1900 he began to work on his own on mathematics summing geometric and arithmetic series.

Ramanujan was shown how to solve cubic equations in 1902 and he went on to find his own method to solve the quartic. The following year, not knowing that the quintic could not be solved by radicals, he tried (and of course failed) to solve the quintic.

It was in the Town High School that Ramanujan came across a mathematics book by G S Carr called Synopsis of elementary results in pure mathematics. This book, with its very concise style, allowed Ramanujan to teach himself mathematics, but the style of the book was to have a rather unfortunate effect on the way Ramanujan was later to write down mathematics since it provided the only model that he had of written mathematical arguments. The book contained theorems, formulae and short proofs. It also contained an index to papers on pure mathematics which had been published in the European Journals of Learned Societies during the first half of the 19^th century. The book, published in 1856, was of course well out of date by the time Ramanujan used it.

By 1904 Ramanujan had begun to undertake deep research. He investigated the series ∑(1/n) and calculated Euler's constant to 15 decimal places. He began to study the Bernoulli numbers, although this was entirely his own independent discovery.

He continued his mathematical work, however, and at this time he worked on hypergeometric series and investigated relations between integrals and series. He was to discover later that he had been studying elliptic functions.

In 1906 Ramanujan went to Madras where he entered Pachaiyappa's College. His aim was to pass the First Arts examination which would allow him to be admitted to the University of Madras. He attended lectures at Pachaiyappa's College but became ill after three months study. He took the First Arts examination after having left the course. He passed in mathematics but failed all his other subjects and therefore failed the examination. This meant that he could not enter the University of Madras. In the following years he worked on mathematics developing his own ideas without any help and without any real idea of the then current research topics other than that provided by Carr's book.

Continuing his mathematical work Ramanujan studied continued fractions and divergent series in 1908. At this stage he became seriously ill again and underwent an operation in April 1909 after which he took him some considerable time to recover. He married on 14 July 1909 when his mother arranged for him to marry a ten year old girl S Janaki Ammal. Ramanujan did not live with his wife, however, until she was twelve years old.

Ramanujan continued to develop his mathematical ideas and began to pose problems and solve problems in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society. He devoloped relations between elliptic modular equations in 1910. After publication of a brilliant research paper on Bernoulli numbers in 1911 in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society he gained recognition for his work. Despite his lack of a university education, he was becoming well known in the Madras area as a mathematical genius.

In 1911 Ramanujan approached the founder of the Indian Mathematical Society for advice on a job. After this he was appointed to his first job, a temporary post in the Accountant General's Office in Madras. It was then suggested that he approach Ramachandra Rao who was a Collector at Nellore. Ramachandra Rao was a founder member of the Indian Mathematical Society who had helped start the mathematics library. He writes in :-

A short uncouth figure, stout, unshaven, not over clean, with one conspicuous feature - shining eyes - walked in with a frayed notebook under his arm. He was miserably poor. ... He opened his book and began to explain some of his discoveries. I saw quite at once that there was something out of the way; but my knowledge did not permit me to judge whether he talked sense or nonsense. ... I asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted a pittance to live on so that he might pursue his researches.

Ramachandra Rao told him to return to Madras and he tried, unsuccessfully, to arrange a scholarship for Ramanujan. In 1912 Ramanujan applied for the post of clerk in the accounts section of the Madras Port Trust. In his letter of application he wrote :-

I have passed the Matriculation Examination and studied up to the First Arts but was prevented from pursuing my studies further owing to several untoward circumstances. I have, however, been devoting all my time to Mathematics and developing the subject.

Despite the fact that he had no university education, Ramanujan was clearly well known to the university mathematicians in Madras for, with his letter of application, Ramanujan included a reference from E W Middlemast who was the Professor of Mathematics at The Presidency College in Madras. Middlemast, a graduate of St John's College, Cambridge, wrote :-

I can strongly recommend the applicant. He is a young man of quite exceptional capacity in mathematics and especially in work relating to numbers. He has a natural aptitude for computation and is very quick at figure work.

On the strength of the recommendation Ramanujan was appointed to the post of clerk and began his duties on 1 March 1912. Ramanujan was quite lucky to have a number of people working round him with a training in mathematics. In fact the Chief Accountant for the Madras Port Trust, S N Aiyar, was trained as a mathematician and published a paper On the distribution of primes in 1913 on Ramanujan's work. The professor of civil engineering at the Madras Engineering College C L T Griffith was also interested in Ramanujan's abilities and, having been educated at University College London, knew the professor of mathematics there, namely M J M Hill. He wrote to Hill on 12 November 1912 sending some of Ramanujan's work and a copy of his 1911 paper on Bernoulli numbers.

Hill replied in a fairly encouraging way but showed that he had failed to understand Ramanujan's results on divergent series. The recommendation to Ramanujan that he read Bromwich's Theory of infinite series did not please Ramanujan much. Ramanujan wrote to E W Hobson and H F Baker trying to interest them in his results but neither replied. In January 1913 Ramanujan wrote to G H Hardy having seen a copy of his 1910 book Orders of infinity. In Ramanujan's letter to Hardy he introduced himself and his work :-

I have had no university education but I have undergone the ordinary school course. After leaving school I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at mathematics. I have not trodden through the conventional regular course which is followed in a university course, but I am striking out a new path for myself. I have made a special investigation of divergent series in general and the results I get are termed by the local mathematicians as 'startling'.

Ramanujan left a number of unpublished notebooks filled with theorems that mathematicians have continued to study. G N Watson, Mason Professor of Pure Mathematics at Birmingham from 1918 to 1951 published 14 papers under the general title Theorems stated by Ramanujan and in all he published nearly 30 papers which were inspired by Ramanujan's work. Hardy passed on to Watson the large number of manuscripts of Ramanujan that he had, both written before 1914 and some written in Ramanujan's last year in India before his death.

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The Ramanujan Prize

The Ramanujan Prize for young mathematicians from developing countries has been created in 2005 at ICTP in the name of the great Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan. The Prize is funded by the Niels Henrik Abel Memorial Fund. Marcelo Viana, professor at the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics in Brazil and one of Latin America's most eminent mathematicians, has won the first-ever Ramanujan Prize.

The Ramanujan Prize, named for the world-renowned Indian scientist Srinivasa Ramanujan who died in 1920 at the age of 33, is designed to recognize the achievements of scientists less than 45 years old who have lived and worked in the developing world. The prize, which carries a US$10,000 cash award, is sponsored by the Niels Henrik Abel Memorial Fund in Norway, the same organization that sponsors the Abel Prize for Mathematics, an internationally renowned award for lifetime achievement. In its three brief years of existence, the Abel Prize, named after the Norwegian-born Niels Henrik Abel, a world-renowned 19th century mathematician, has emerged as one of the world?s most prestigious prizes in mathematics.

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Pierre de Fermat's birthday celebrated in Google Doodle

 

 

La Poste commemorated Pierre de Fermat's  400th birth anniversary on a postage stamp in 2001

 

Hi ! Just received a mail from Mr Anurag Pratap of Silvassa about this news with the postage stamp issued by French Post…I wish  to share it with the readers …Some might have noticed it in 17th August 2011 in Google Doodle ….Those who have not noticed, might like the stamp issued on great “Amateur Mathematician” !  Mathematics  is a wonderful theme for the lovers of this subject ! This is all in this Post…Have a Nice Time !

The birthday of Pierre de Fermat, the 17th century French lawyer famous for the so-called 'Fermat's Last Theorem' mathematical puzzle, was celebrated in a Google Doodle on 17th August 2011. Because Ferment did not spread his work through books and journals and he often did not provide any proof for his theorems he was referred to as an 'amateur' mathematician, but that the same time Fermat is also considered to be one of the two (the other being Rene Descartes) leading mathematicians of the first half of the 17th century. Pierre de Fermat died at the age of 63 on January 12, 1665 at Castres, France.

Google doodles have gained immense popularity over the past few years and the Google team has put out commemorative doodles on events ranging from news events, civic milestones, birthdays, death anniversaries and important dates in history. Google estimates it has created more than 900 doodles since 1998, with 270 of them running in 2010.

The Doodle of  Pierre de Fermat shows a blackboard with algebraic symbols on it, with the word "Google" faintly visible as though rubbed out earlier. The symbols read: xⁿ + yⁿ ≠ zⁿ. If you hover your mouse over the Doodle, the pop-up text reads "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this theorem, which this doodle is too small to contain."

Pierre de Fermat, was born on 17 August 1601, 410 years ago. A lawyer at the Parlement of Toulouse and a gifted amateur mathematician, he made breakthroughs in several fields of calculus, probability, geometry and number theory, but is best known for a brief note he made in the margin of a book of arithmetic. His enigmatic aside set the scene for perhaps the greatest mathematical mystery of all time.

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New Stamp…

Joint Issue : Portugal - Thailand

 

Date of Issue : 20 July 2011

Diplomatic Relations : Portugal - Thailand

 

500 Years of the Arrival of the Portuguese to Siam and the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations

Five centuries of unbroken relations from 1511 to 2011 between Portugal, the oldest established nation in the West, and Thailand, the only Southeast Asian State ever to be colonized,  go far beyond simple trade contacts and are a unique case in the annals of international relations, with diplomatic, political, military, religious, cultural and sociological dimensions. The relationship from the very beginning was one between equal nation states.

 
In the former capital, Ayutthaya, where a Portuguese district with churches and a mixed Luso Thai population long existed, generations of naval pilots, soldiers, interpreters and doctors loyally served the Kings of Siam. From the 16th to the 18th Century, portuguese was the lingua franca, and it was here that the Portuguese introduced technology and the skills of military construction, as well as European pharmacology and medicine.

Sia, was closely connected to the Asian possessions of the Portuguese Crown and received large and important embassies from Portuguese centres such as Malacca, Macau and Goa, The relations between the two countries remained unaltered, even during the troubled times of the war of liberation led by King Taksin – whose personal guard was provided by Portuguese military men – and Rama I, who received important military assistance from the Portuguese Queen Dona Maria I, in 1796.

In 1820, Siam and Portugal signed the first written treaty of modern times, ensuring Siam’s full integration in to the international community. During the period of the major reforms that took place during  the 19th century and the  beginning of the 20th century, under the reign of Rama V and Rama VI, many Portuguese from Macau settled in Bangkok acting as advisors to the Siamese government. Unlike other foreigners, they became Siamese citizens and received Thai citizenship. The history of this old alliance is an eloquent and pioneering example of fruitful dialogue between civilizations.

Club News

 

PHILANIPPON – 2011
World stamp exhibition, Yokohama city, Japan (28th July – 2nd August 2011)

Pradeep Jain from Patna writes…

Participating in Philanippon 2011 as a booth holder representing India, Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka was a very pleasant experience. Being my first visit to Japan, I was excited on one hand but anxious on the other given the unfamiliar culture, taste and preferences and above all difference in language.

( From L to R ) : Mr Pradip Jain, Mr AR Singhee (Jury ) Mr Tay Peng Hian, RDP President FIP, Mrs Singhee, Mrs Pramila Jain and Mr Praggya Kothari

Exhibition hall was well organised and perfectly laid out providing sufficient displays and space for the visitors. The end of the exhibition hall featured rows of collections of various categories. One side of the hall had space for postal operators and the other side for domestic and international dealers. My most memorable moment was watching kids
engrossed in various activities spread across the exhibition hall. Another Interesting feature of the Exhibition was the presence of various security printer international and domestic who were giving out special souvenirs.

Visitors at Mr Pradip Jain’s Booth

A special mention of Cartor Security printers - who had brought in their printing machine in the the exhibition hall. Visitors were provided hands-on demo and interesting souvenirs which was printed and perforated on spot was given as gift. Over the next few days as the crowd of stamp lovers increased, I am especially grateful to Japan Post for arranging a volunteer that provided assistance to us in the booth during the crucial hours of massive crowd.

Overall my experience of Phila Nippon, Japan post and Japan was of immense satisfaction. Starting from our arrival,hotel accommodation, exhibition and finally custom clearance and departure, I had never witnessed anything so smooth, well managed and professionally handled. In the face of great natural calamity faced by Japanese, organising an event of such magnitude with great efficiency is remarkable achievement in itself. My Heartiest gratitude to organizers of Phila Nippon and People of Japan for their services and hospitality which i shall carry with me for my life.

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