This is a really great and varied day for birthdays. Really some days have a lot of the same kind of people. But as I think you will see, there are some really fascinating people today.

On this day in 1787, educator Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was born. He was a pioneer in the education of the deaf in the United States. As you can well imagine, deaf children at the beginning of the 19th century were largely ignored (and abused). He began teaching a neighborhood deaf child and this eventually resulted in him studying in France where the education of the deaf was far advanced. When he came back to the United States, he founded the American School for the Deaf, which is still in operation with 200 students. It will turn 200 years old in 2017.

The mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi was born in 1804. Now he actually did work that I understand: elliptic functions and differential equations. He has the distinction of being the first Jewish mathematics professor at a German university. It’s kind of creepy to think about that given what happened there just a hundred years later. But it wasn’t just Germany. Throughout Europe, Jews were seen as some kind of horrible creatures. Remember what Martin Luther thought of them just 200 years earlier. As much as I have my problems with the Israeli government, their paranoia is about a lot more than just the Nazis. And there is a sad irony that I’ve seen with other races. Jacobi basically worked himself to death. I think that is part of trying to prove to the majority that they ought to accept you. But instead, it is used as yet another reason for the majority to hate you.

The great Romantic composer Cesar Franck was born in 1822. Over time, I’ve had to reevaluate my distaste for the Romantic period. What I don’t like about it is the average material. Mediocre Baroque or Classical music is generally quite listenable. Mediocre Romantic music is annoying in the extreme. It tends toward sentimentality and when a composer doesn’t know what else to do, he simply adds unnecessary harmonic complexity. To be fair, the situation gets even worse in the Modern period. But I don’t rant about mediocre Modern composition, because it is rarely played. Anyway, Franck is no mediocrity. I’m sure he had his bad work, just like everyone. But I’ve never heard anything of his that I didn’t quite like. Here is his Sonata in A major for Violin and Piano, which is one of the greatest works of the 19th century. The whole piece is about a half hour long, but I highly recommend listening to it all. You can’t fully appreciate it by listening to just one movement. Unfortunately, I can only locate one live performance of it, which is good, but it is recorded at such a low volume that you miss much of its subtlety. Here is Joshua Bell & Jeremy Denk performing it brilliantly:

It was hard not to give this day to Emily Dickinson who was born on this day in 1830. I feel a great kinship with her because of her agoraphobia. I would rather conduct my relationships through letters. (I’m not saying this is a good thing.) But Dickinson was also interested in a lot of the same things that I am and her thinking of metaphysics certainly parallels mine. Regardless, I thought I would present “The Mystery of Pain.” I found a version online for teachers where it comments, “This poem is suitable to be taught for Junior High School students because it has a great moral value of life. It notices to be patient when we are in a pain, and we have to realize that everything will change, there is no everlasting pain. Since the language used is quite hard to understand, the teacher should assist students to find the correct interpretation of the poem.” All I can say is that I hope the teachers understand the poem better than whomever wrote that! Let me give you my interpretation. We tend to not be able to imagine that we will always feel the way we now do and that’s a drag when we are feeling pain. But the enlightened mind will know that the pain will go away, only to be replaced by another pain. I would find that a depressing thought if it were not exactly what I know to be true.

Melvil Dewey was born in 1851. He was my kind of guy. I really like coming up with structures for things. Of course, I’m the worst person in the world to implement those structures. He is, of course, the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System. In my opinion, the Dewey Decimal System is better than the Library of Congress System. This is nothing especially against the LCS, but it is designed for a particular purpose and is focused on making libraries useful for specialists. For the generalist (and that’s most people), the DDS is more consistent. The way that “religion” (100s) is subdivided is the same way that “technology” (600s) is. No attempts at all are made to make different categories of knowledge consistent. Intellectuals tend to prefer the LCS, because that is what college libraries use. But that’s not a good reason. What’s more, ethnocentric and sexist aspects of both systems have been demonstrated, but only the DDS has made major improvements in this regard. Melvil Dewey was also a big proponent of the metric system. Like I said: he was my kind of guy!

And the great Shakespearean actor (and much more), Kenneth Branagh is 53 today. I don’t have a lot to say about him, except that I’m a huge fan. Here he is as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, the film I use to introduce Shakespeare to those who do not like him. Here is a very funny part:

And then a more serious scene:

Unfortunately, I can’t find the scene after that where Benedick challenges Claudio. But don’t just think of Branagh with regard to this film. His Hamlet is excellent. And he turns the awful Love’s Labour’s Lost into a fine little film. He was also excellent as Iago in Othello. I’m also quite fond of him in How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog. Why he has taken to directing things like Thor and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, I cannot say.

Other birthdays: astronomer Johannes Stoffler (1452); botanist George Shaw (1751); composer Olivier Messiaen (1908); comedy writer Douglas Kenney (1946); Indian sculptor Jasuben Shilpi (1948); and actor Susan Dey (61).

The day, however, belongs to Ada Lovelace who was born in 1815. She worked on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. She developed the first algorithm for the machine. This makes her the first computer programmer in history. The programming language Ada is named after her. She was, incidentally, the only legitimate child of Lord Byron (hey, the man got around).

It is interesting (Profoundly so!) how much sexism still exists in academia. This first program was created to compute Bernoulli numbers. A number of (male) scholars have tried to claim that Lovelace did not really write the program because Babbage provided her with the mathematics for the calculations. There is all kinds of stupid and bigoted in that contention. First, Babbage himself notes that he provided Lovelace with the mathematics to save her the trouble. It wasn’t as though the mathematics had never been worked out. And when Lovelace got his notes, she found and corrected a major mistake he had made. (None of this should be taken as a slight against Babbage who was brilliant and extremely generous in giving Lovelace credit.) Second, computer programmers use the work of mathematicians all the time. It is not a trivial matter to convert even simple equations (which is not the case with the Bernoulli numbers) into modern computer languages on modern computers, much less on the Analytical Engine.

I think the wish to disregard Lovelace’s contributions comes not just from her sex but also because she was manic-depressive. That is not the picture of the Romantic scientific hero that many (men) want to accept. One scholar claimed that Ada’s correspondence indicated that it was “obvious once again that Ada was as mad as a hatter.” I would note that many mathematicians were pretty far out. Kurt Godel could certainly be described as “mad as a hatter.” The same could be said of that other great computer pioneer, Alan Turing, whose fascination with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs caused him to kill himself by eating an apple he had poisoned with cyanide. There is no doubt of the importance of Ada Lovelace, and the attacks on her are typical of just how small the minds of big brained people can be.

Happy birthday Ada Lovelace!

This is going to be a hard day. My allergies are going crazy. As a result, I had to take one of those pills that puts me to sleep. So we’ll see if I can make it through this article without collapsing on the keyboard. And this is gonna be hard. I have two major physicists today who deserve a lot of attention. They will probably get short shrift. But don’t worry. They’re both dead. No feelings will be hurt.

On this day in 1868, the great theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld was born. He did a bunch of stuff that you wouldn’t understand anyway. Do you know what quantum spin is? Of course you don’t. Just give up now. What Sommerfeld is most important for (and you’ll like this because it’s history) is his teaching of other physicists who did work that you wouldn’t understand. One of those people also has a birthday today. (It’s a surprise!) Another is Wolfgang Pauli. What did Pauli do that was so great? Quantum spin. Which you don’t understand. When I was young and smart, I read a manuscript by him. I didn’t really understand it. But above all, Pauli is remembered for having looked a lot like Peter Lorre. Neither Pauli nor Lorre have birthdays today. Sommerfeld does. He would be 145 today, and you have to assume that he would have lost his intellectual edge.

Speaking of Peter Lorre, the great film director Fritz Lang was born in 1890. Apart from M, which oddly made Lorre a star, he is best know for Metropolis, with the inventor Rotwang. That’s important to me, because there is an economist who writes under that name, but no one will tell me who he really is. Here is a scene from M. What I love about the film is that Lang seems to be one of the few people besides me who feels sorry for pedophiles. That’s not an excuse for what they do, but I cannot think of a greater hell than to be sexually attracted to children.

Walt Disney was born in 1901. Three things about Disney. First, he was antisemitic. Look, I don’t think he was a “kill all the Jews” type. And his thinking (including other racist attitudes) was much more common in those days. But he was sympathetic to the Nazis. There’s no denying that. Second, I think it is very funny that after he died, everyone thought he was frozen, as though we just couldn’t live without him. Personally, I think his early work sucked. And only a few of the later features are truly great. But the biggest reason I hate Disney, and admittedly, it isn’t really his fault, is copyright. For the sake of fucking Mickey Mouse (a really stupid character anyway), copyright lengths just get longer and longer. Personally, I want to see Mickey Mouse in porn films. I want to see him gang raped by a marauding passel of opossums. (Admit it: you didn’t know a group of opossums is called a “passel.” Of course, neither did I until I looked it up. And I’ll probably forget by tomorrow.)

Oh my God! Can you believe that Little Richard is 81 today? Hell, what is there to say?

Humorist Calvin Trillin is 78. He still writes poems for The Nation each week. But I will always love him for the chicken story:

Other birthdays: Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev (1803); musician JJ Cale (1938); record producer Frank Wilson (1940); musician Jim Messina (66); and actor Lisa Marie (45).

The day, however, belongs to Arnold Sommerfeld’s student Werner Heisenberg who was born in 1901. He is one of the most important figures in the development of quantum mechanics. The most important person was Max Planck, who never accepted the theory, but that is the subject for another day (namely, 23 Apr 2013). There are two standard formalisms of quantum mechanics, one is Heisenberg’s and the other is Erwin Schrodinger’s. Most people know of Schrodinger’s, which probably explains why people are so confused about quantum mechanics. Schrodinger used a “wave equation.” But this is all about statistics and probability. Unfortunately, people think it has something to do with particles acting like waves. Particles do in fact act like waves, but that’s not what the wave equation is all about.

Heisenberg used infinite matrices. This puts people off. First, they don’t understand matrices and second, they don’t understand infinity. In general, theoretical physicists like Heisenberg’s formalism because it is easier to work with. I can tell you that this is only true of really smart people, because I had to learn that stuff and “easy” was not a word I would ever apply to it.

Heisenberg’s formalism did, however, have the advantage of leading to the uncertainty principle. This is the idea that you can only know the product of the velocity (actually momentum) and location of a particle to a certain accuracy. So the more accurately you know the position of a particle, the less accurately you know the velocity. This does not come out of Schrodinger’s formalism. For years I thought this was just a limit to the theory. But there does indeed seem to be a physical basis for this. The universe really is bizarre and unknowable. Of course, I’m not even certain that I exist. But that is a very long discussion for another time. Anyway.

Happy birthday Werner Heisenberg! (Insert Breaking Bad joke here.)