Odysseys in the Pursuit of Enlightenment

Struggles of Unsung Scientists Who Enlightened the World

Arun S. Wagh

• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781662440465
• eBook ISBN: 9781662440472
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

This book takes the reader on an enchanting journey into the lives of fourteen genius scientists who lived during the enlightenment period to the mid-twentieth century. They suffered ethnic, gender, sexual prejudices, cultural and religious taboos, poverty, and epidemics. Most lived a very short life. And yet, their intuition and perseverance prevailed, and their pioneering discoveries changed the world. Their tragic lives faded away over time. However, the fruits of their work, including computer and nuclear technologies, space science, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering, have shaped our lives. When we look back, their inspirational life stories appear more fictional than real. Each story takes the reader into varying times, places, customs, and environments. The book should interest not only a science nerd but also an armchair reader who loves fiction.

1

The Blind Visionary

Leonhard Euler (1707­­­­–1783)

During my undergraduate years, Pradeep Sane, a blind student was in my dormitory on the same floor as mine but a few doors down the corridor farther from the stairs. I could see his confidence in walking unescorted along the corridors or holding the railing and climbing the stairs one step at a time and stepping toward his room. I wondered how he could spot his room in the row of identical rooms with painted numbers. When he arrived to his room, he took out the key from his pocket, inserted it in the lock on the door, opened it, went in, and shut the door behind him like anybody else. So often me and my other friends, the fortunate ones with twenty-twenty vision, would fumble at a wrong door.

I was curious to find out how Pradeep could be so independent but was hesitant to ask. Ironically in a hurry to go to a class one morning, I bumped into him. Thoroughly embarrassed, I apologized. He reciprocated with a smile, and we went to our respective classes. Guilty of the fact that I was at fault with my 20/20 vision, I went to his room in the evening and took him to a nearby restaurant, and we chatted over a cup of tea. Once my hesitancy melted away, I asked him how he had developed his confidence in going around on the college campus. He explained, “I count steps, remember the number of steps to the stairs, steps in the staircase, across the quadrangle, then to my class and then back to my room,” and grinned.

Pradeep had inserted numbers in place of his vision lost to the epidemic of smallpox during his childhood. Spots on his face attested to that. During the rehabilitation in his youth, he learned to depend on numbers, and did it very thoroughly. After our graduation, I lost contact with Pradeep, but Leonhard Euler, one of the greatest polymaths, refreshes my memory of him.

If Isaac Newton (1643–1727) and Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) were the greatest visionaries of science during the Renaissance period (fourteenth to seventeenth century) (see appendix 1),1 Euler was the visionary of the Enlightenment period (eighteenth century). He was born on April 15, 1707, when the renaissance age ended and the enlightenment period started. This period gave birth to Europe’s philosophical movement that created mature political and social conditions of free-thinking, and it was an apt era for a prolific thinker like Euler. During this period, the Fathers of the American constitution, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, traveled to Europe and participated in debates on the enlightenment. They returned with dreams of freedom, free press, and individual rights for the American Society, then declared independence from the British and wrote the American Constitution with help from the French under the Franco-American Treaty of 1778.2 The Statue of Liberty attests to this cooperation. Euler lived for long, seventy-six years in that era, and used his free-thinking to develop basic tools in mathematics and other physical sciences. Leibniz died when Euler was young and Newton, when Euler had just launched his career as a mathematician. Euler carried their mantle by proving new theorems, identities, simplifying and streamlining mathematical notations by introducing the concept of functions and uncovering the beauty and simplicity of mathematics. He believed mathematics could be used to di...

Table of contents

• The Blind Visionary
• The Child Prodigy
• Minding the Heavens
• A Dame Extraordinaire
• The Decoder of the Celestial Barcodes
• Motivated by the Motive Power
• Magellan Voyager of Mathematical Oceans
• The Final Scientific Testament
• The Russian Gypsy
• Silent Signals of the Cepheid Star
• The Reluctant Warrior
• Fermat Reborn
• Codebreaker’s Mind and Machine
• The Casualty of a Spiraling Feud