Polymath Brewing

Another Birthday we celebrate is for Renaissance POLYMATH Nicolaus Copernicus who responsible for what some have called the Copernican Revolution. A language polyglot, he obtained a doctorate in canon law and was also a mathematician, astronomer, physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, and economist. Copernicus is considered by many to be the father of modern astronomy. He is known for being the first to go public with heliocentric theory in his work ...‘De revolutionibus’ or ‘About Revolutions’; a treatise containing the theory that Earth and the other planets orbited around the sun. This was a direct contradiction of the geocentric theory that had prevailed since the time of Ptolemy; the belief that Earth, and subsequently mankind, were at the center of the universe. The discoveries he made sparked a new school of astronomical thought and became the basis for theories made by Galileo, Newton, and Kepler. The work they did helped to perfect his original theory. The eternal student, he spent his life studying law, math, and medicine while he fulfilled his duties to the church and even acting as an ambassador for his country. It was only after a lifetime of study and astronomical observation that he was able to formulate the theory that changed the way we thought about the cosmos, which he published despite his fear of persecution at the hands of the church he loved. In 1517 he derived a quantity theory of money a key concept in economics. He was one of the first people to combine mathematics and astronomy. #POLYMATH #NicolausCopernicus #Copernicus

Happy birthday yesterday to an influential 17th-century POLYMATH Gottfried Leibniz. He was a prominent German POLYMATH and philosopher in the history of mathematics and the history of philosophy. His most notable accomplishment was conceiving the grand ideas of differential and integral calculus independently and simultaneously with Isaac Newton's similar conceptions. Mathematical works have always favored Leibniz's notation as the conventional expression of calculus, while ...Newton's notation became unused. He became one of the most prolific inventors in the field of mechanical calculators. While working on adding automatic multiplication and division to Pascal's calculator, he was the first to describe a pinwheel calculator in 1685 and invented the Leibniz wheel, used in the arithmometer, the first mass-produced mechanical calculator. He also refined the binary number system, which is the foundation of virtually all digital computers. In philosophy, Leibniz is most noted for his optimism, i.e. his conclusion that our Universe is, in a restricted sense, the best possible one that God could have created, an idea that was often lampooned by others such as Voltaire. Leibniz, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, was one of the three great 17th-century advocates of rationalism. The work of Leibniz anticipated modern logic and analytic philosophy. Leibniz made major contributions to physics and technology and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in philosophy, probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. He wrote works on philosophy, politics, law, ethics, theology, history, and philology. Leibniz also contributed to the field of library science. While serving as overseer of the Wolfenbüttel library in Germany, he devised a cataloging system that would serve as a guide for many of Europe's largest libraries. Leibniz's contributions to this vast array of subjects were scattered in various learned journals, in tens of thousands of letters, and in unpublished manuscripts. He wrote in several languages, but primarily in Latin, French, and German. #POLYMATH #GottfriedLeibniz

French POLYMATH Blaise Pascal was a mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and theologian. He was a child prodigy whose earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum. In honor of his scientific contributions, the name Pascal has been given to the SI unit of pressure, to a programming language, and Pascal's law, Pascal's triangle, and Pascal's wager still... bear his name. Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method. While still a teenager, he started pioneering work on calculating machines. After three years of effort and 50 prototypes, he built 20 finished machines (called Pascal's calculators and later Pascalines) over the following 10 years, establishing him as one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator. Pascal was an important mathematician, helping create two major new areas of research: he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of 16, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Pascal's work in the fields of the study of hydrodynamics and hydrostatics centered on the principles of hydraulic fluids. His inventions include the hydraulic press (using hydraulic pressure to multiply force) and the syringe. Pascal's development of probability theory was his most influential contribution to mathematics. Originally applied to gambling, today it is extremely important in economics, especially in actuarial science. In literature, Pascal is regarded as one of the most important authors of the French Classical Period and is read today as one of the greatest masters of French prose. His use of satire and wit influenced later polemicists. Pascal had poor health, especially after the age of 18, and he died just two months after his 39th birthday #POLYMATH #BlaisePascal #Pascal

Happy Birthday to POLYMATH Herbert A. Simon who was an American economist and political scientist whose primary interest was decision-making within organizations and is best known for the theories of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing". He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978 and the Turing Award in 1975. His research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature and spanned across the fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management,... and political science. He was at Carnegie Mellon University for most of his career, from 1949 to 2001. Notably, Simon was among the pioneers of several modern-day scientific domains such as artificial intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, organization theory, and complex systems. He was among the earliest to analyze the architecture of complexity and to propose a preferential attachment mechanism to explain power law distributions. Seeking to replace the highly simplified classical approach to economic modeling, Simon became best known for his theory of corporate decision in his book Administrative Behavior. In this book, he based his concepts with an approach that recognized multiple factors that contribute to decision making. Simon has made a great number of contributions to both economic analysis and applications. Because of this, his work can be found in a number of economic literary works, making contributions to areas such as mathematical economics including theorem, human rationality, behavioral study of firms, theory of casual ordering, and the analysis of the parameter identification problem in econometrics. Simon had a keen interest in the arts, as he was a pianist. He was also a keen mountain climber. As a testament to his wide interests, he at one point taught an undergraduate course on the French Revolution. #POLYMATH #HerbertSimon

Happy Birthday to Thomas Young, a British POLYMATH and physician. Young made notable scientific contributions to the fields of vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, language, musical harmony, and Egyptology. He made a number of original and insightful innovations in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs (specifically the Rosetta Stone) before Jean-François Champollion eventually expanded on his work. Young has been described as "The Last Man Who Knew Everythi...ng" At the age of fourteen Young had learned Greek and Latin and was acquainted with French, Italian, Hebrew, German, Aramaic, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Amharic. In 1801, Young was appointed a professor of natural philosophy (mainly physics) at the Royal Institution. In two years, he delivered 91 lectures. In 1802, he was appointed a foreign secretary of the Royal Society, of which he had been elected a fellow in 1794. He resigned his professorship in 1803, fearing that its duties would interfere with his medical practice. Young was highly regarded by his friends and colleagues. He was said never to impose his knowledge, but if asked was able to answer even the most difficult scientific question with ease. Although very learned he had a reputation for sometimes having difficulty in communicating his knowledge. It was said by one of his contemporaries that, "His words were not those in familiar use, and the arrangement of his ideas seldom the same as those he conversed with. He was, therefore, worse calculated than any man I ever knew for the communication of knowledge." #POLYMATH #ThomasYoung