One of my current hobbies at the moment is trying to come up with a relational schema for the New Testament...in Greek!
This aim is not as off the wall as it may appear. Some of my earliest computing experience came while helping my father, John Hurd, as he developed a system for teaching Koine (New Testament) Greek to his students while he was in the Faculty of Divinity at Trinity College in the University of Toronto in the early 1970's. At the time the best available platform was the programming language APL running on an IBM 360 mainframe.
Throughout high school I maintained interest in the sciences and mathematics, as well as the classics, completing four years of instruction in Latin and three in Greek. It is only now in retrospect that I realize that my Latin teacher Mr. Lloyd in all probability taught the Greek classes for free as we scheduled them before school or during lunch periods to an exponentially decaying group of students (Greek 1 had eight students, Greek 2, four and Greek 3 two!). It should be noted that while I was nosed out for my high school's math prize, I was the recipient of their Latin prize.
In the 1990's my father ported the Greek Tutor to the PC via a version of APL for that platform. A few years ago he retired after serving as Dean of the Divinity School and being awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from the U of T.
I have long hoped that we would be able to revive the code for a "modern" platform and when the iPad came along I decided that the time has come. My subsequent experience with database-backed software design may color my perceptions (to the man with a hammer all the world's a nail), but looking at the code what I saw at base was a database.
Essentially the Greek Tutor combines lessons in Greek grammar with the ability to browse and search the entirety of the Greek New Testament. The program "knows" about every word in the New Testament including part of speech and how the word forms relate to each other. The challenge has been that the data was locked (actually quite literally) in proprietary files specific to the APL language. A secondary problem has been that the code was written long before the adoption of the UNICODE standard and therefore the treatment of Greek characters was proprietary. However, I am happy to report that with the kind assistance of people on the new group comp.lang.apl and the availability of a freeware, compatible APL implementation, APLSE, the conversion is well underway.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
In Memoriam Martin Gardner 1914-2010
It was with considerable sadness I read about the passing of Martin Gardner. Among his many accomplishments many of us remember him as the author of the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American for 25 years starting before I was born.
I am hardly unique among math PhD's who owe in some way my inspiration for joining the field on his columns. My father was a great fan and he and I pored over each article. We folded flexagons, and my father wrote an early computer program to simulate Conway's Game of Life, an early cellular automaton. When Martin wrote his article on trap door ciphers, my father and I wrote to MIT to get a copy of Rivest, Shamir and Adelman's paper, at the time the first mathematical reprint I had ever seen.
In middle school I based two science fair projects on material I gleaned from Martin's columns. The first was a project on the subject of topology and the second was about the Platonic and Archimedean solids. Apart from the technical content, it was a good example of father-son collaboration. For the latter project we worked the paper cutter as an assembly line helping me mass produce equilateral triangles, squares and pentagons as well as a few more exotic shapes.
Of all the topics exposed by Martin, my favorite was always his expositions on topology. He mentioned in these articles that topology was full of theorems that were easy to state and hard to prove Topologists also had a knack for catchy names for theorems such as the "Pancake Theorem", the "Ham Sandwich Theorem" and the admonition that "You can't comb the hair on a billiard ball."
I pursued the study of topology among other topics throughout my undergraduate years and into graduate school although I eventually detoured into other branches of mathematics such as algebraic geometry and eventually dynamical systems theory. The aforementioned theorems among other more general principles gave me my first glimpse of the difference between a result being "deep" and merely "complicated". In many ways this depth has informed my outlook on how the universe works and for that I thank Martin.
I am hardly unique among math PhD's who owe in some way my inspiration for joining the field on his columns. My father was a great fan and he and I pored over each article. We folded flexagons, and my father wrote an early computer program to simulate Conway's Game of Life, an early cellular automaton. When Martin wrote his article on trap door ciphers, my father and I wrote to MIT to get a copy of Rivest, Shamir and Adelman's paper, at the time the first mathematical reprint I had ever seen.
In middle school I based two science fair projects on material I gleaned from Martin's columns. The first was a project on the subject of topology and the second was about the Platonic and Archimedean solids. Apart from the technical content, it was a good example of father-son collaboration. For the latter project we worked the paper cutter as an assembly line helping me mass produce equilateral triangles, squares and pentagons as well as a few more exotic shapes.
Of all the topics exposed by Martin, my favorite was always his expositions on topology. He mentioned in these articles that topology was full of theorems that were easy to state and hard to prove Topologists also had a knack for catchy names for theorems such as the "Pancake Theorem", the "Ham Sandwich Theorem" and the admonition that "You can't comb the hair on a billiard ball."
I pursued the study of topology among other topics throughout my undergraduate years and into graduate school although I eventually detoured into other branches of mathematics such as algebraic geometry and eventually dynamical systems theory. The aforementioned theorems among other more general principles gave me my first glimpse of the difference between a result being "deep" and merely "complicated". In many ways this depth has informed my outlook on how the universe works and for that I thank Martin.
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