Three Nerds and a Toilet Seat

Dear Folk,

Today, August 8, marks events in three great scientists' lives. One was born, one died, and one built a castle. Bet you have even heard of at least one of them. Or maybe not.

Some sources give August 8, 1602 and some give August 10 as the birthday of Gilles Roberval. Hey, I am going to celebrate both days and so can you. Roberval was a nerd of 14 when he first got into math. He left his native Senlis, France to travel all over the country. He would truck around to universities and annoy math teachers. Whenever possible he earned a living teaching math to other kids. Know anybody like him today? Of course you do. He even went to Bordeaux to meet with Fermat (famous for his unprovable "Last Theorem" - I could tell you but then...well, you know.) BTW, Tom Stoppard's play "Arcadia" explores that pesky theorem.

In 1632 he was made a professor at the College Gervais in Paris and then two years later he was appointed to the Ramus chair of mathematics in the College Royale. What was his big thing? Integration - finding the area or volume of geometric figures. He also did pretty well at drawing tangents to curves. He is credited with being the father of the geometry of motion. He even invented a balance type scale which is still used as a standard. He worked with Jean Picard in map making and helped Blaise Pascal with some of the instruments he used.

Roberval died on October 27, 1675 in Paris.

Today August 8, 1579, Tycho Brahe laid the cornerstone for his castle Uranienborg. Any of you remember this great Danish astronomer? I sure do!

Tycho Brahe was a nephew of the warship sailor Jörgen Brahe. His uncle was considered to be very proficient but also somewhat violent to his crew. Jörgen Brahe died 1565 when he valiantly jumped into the cold water from a bridge to save the king Fredrik II. Fredrik II was nothing if he was not a grateful king. May the Blessed Mother of God grant that all kings are so grateful. Fredrik II took special notice of young nephew Tycho. Tycho had discovered a new star, "stella nova", in Cassiopeia in 1572. Yep, that is where we get the term "nova." Small aside: Chevy Novas were not doing well in sales in Mexico. Seems that nova could be translated into "does not go."

In 1576 Tycho received the island Hven as a gift from King Fredrik II. Yep, it was just like heaven. A beautiful place to build a castle with an observatory, Uranienborg. It was named for Urania, the goddess of astronomy / astrology. Everything would be as smooth as a prune danish but Tycho was a tad choleric. In 1597 he had hacked off a number of royal supporters and had to leave his island.

He wandered around Europe to Hamburg and then to Prague. he got a nice castle near Prague from Emperor Rudolf II. It wasn't the same. Hamlet was not the only melancholy Dane.

Tycho Brahe built a remarkable star catalogue of over 1000 stars, far more than any astronomer before him. That was a lot of nights just sitting out in the dark with a red light and a pencil. He proved that comets are not objects in the atmosphere. He showed irregularities in the moon's orbit. His wall quadrant and other instruments became widely copied and lead to improved stellar instruments. Kepler used Tycho Brahe's observations when he constructed his famous laws of planetary movement. Okay, Tycho still thought the earth was the center of the solar system with the moon, then the sun orbiting it. Of course, he had the rest of the planets orbiting the sun. Pretty close, right?

Tycho hired Johannes Kepler in 1600 to help him. Tycho was only to live less than a year after that. Kepler wrotes down Tycho Brahe's last words: "Ne frustra vixisse videar" (May I not seemed to have lived in vain)

Tycho's wife was a commoner, Kirstin Jörgensdatter. They were never married in church. She gave him three sons and five daughters. Guess he did not stay out every night. Tycho had a brother Steen, who became a nobleman, and a sister Sofie, who studied alchemy, astrology and medicine on the island of Hven. Tycho lived by the words "Non videri sed esse" (Not to be seen but to be.)

The castle Uranienborg and his observatory Stjärneborg were destroyed within a few years of the death of Tycho Brahe. Built a shopping mall and some cheap condos there, I bet.

Girolamo Fracastoro died on or near August 8, 1553 in Verona, his home town. He had been born there 75 years before. His dad had a small villa outside of town and Fracastoro spent most of his early life there. He received his first literary and philosophical instruction from his father. Later, when he outstripped his dad's knowledge, he studied literature, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine at the University of Padua, and received his M.D. degree in 1502.

Fracastoro's scientific thought culminated and concluded with "De contagione et contagiosis morbis et curatione" (1546), which assured him a lasting place in the history of epidemiology. In it he described a whole raft of contagious diseases and the means by which contagion can be spread. Understand that this was about 300 years before Pasteur. Closely associated with this was "Syphilis, sive morbus gallicus" the book that gave the disease its name. Now I am no Latin scholar but does it seem that "morbus" might mean sickness or deadly disease and "gallicus" meaning French? How about that! Maybe it doesn't mean that at all. Still, it would seem logical for a boy from Verona to think
that. "Syphilis" contains an important section on Columbus' discovery of America, although Fracastoro rejected the theory. already being circulated, that Columbus brought the disease back to Europe from the New World. Nowhere in this work is anything about toilet seats or public swimming pools; I checked.

Fracastoro was not content to just practice medicine on nasty diseases. He was a humanist poet, and some of his medical works, including Syphilis, are in poetry. I am now entertaining the idea of a poetry contest with STDs as a theme. Wait until I ask for entries, please. Besides his medical writings, he also published works on natural philosophy (a work on sympathies and antipathies), and astronomy. He also studied the medicinal properties of plants.

What have we learned from this? If you jump in to save a king, your survivors might get something good? Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate? Best not hack off your landlord? Mathematicians even annoy other mathematicians - probably *especially* annoy? If you want to make a splash in history, it helps to start young? How about: even venereal diseases are grist for poetry's mill? You betcha!

Happiest of birthdays to Ioseph of Locksley, historian par excellence

As always, if you wish to spread this contagion, leave my name and sig attached.

Venus if you will, please send a little girl for me to thrill,
J. Ellsworth Weaver

SCA - Sir Balthazar of Endor
AS - Polyphemus Theognis
TRV - Sebastian Yeats