Tuesday 11 March 2014

Soul Music


19th century convicts were allowed to stop on their way to the scaffold and pray for their souls in front of a statue of the Madonna known as the Refugium Peccatorum, a title used for a painting by the Turin-based painter Luigi Crosio, whose daughter Carola in 1887 married the Italian mathematician and teacher of infinitesimal calculus, Giuseppe Peano.  He introduced modern symbols for union and intersection into set theory, and the standard axiomatization of the natural numbers is named after him. He believed that  to encourage mathematical knowledge one had to speak in Latin. Augustus Albi, who has problems with English, thinks this is an excellent idea (excellens cuius ideam). However Peano died of a heart attack in 1931.

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