Monday, August 27, 2012

Physics as a Continent

Here is a post from the blog Strange Maps showing Bernard H. Porter’s 1939 depiction of the history of physics as a continental map, complete with rivers of thought, villages named after the pioneers of physics, and a scattering of symbols. Several thinkers prominent to probability and statistics can be found on the map, being natural philosophers of their time. Included are Pascal, Laplace, the Bernoullis, and Galton, although his dates are wrong. He was born in 1822 but he died in 1911 not 1899 as listed. We need a map like this for just the field of statistics. It also brings to mind the old IBM timeline of the history of mathematics which has been updated by IBM for the iPad. From Strange Maps at Think Big via The Quantum Pontiff.

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