Amazing Science Quotes

Most of us know Louis Pasteur as a great microbiologist, more popularly by his invention of pasteurization used so commonly today.

Wikipedia quotes:

Louis Pasteur (27 December 1822 – 28 September 1895) French microbiologist, chemist, pioneer of the "Germ theory of disease", and inventor of the process of Pasteurization.

Amongst the more interesting things you can read about him on Wiki are the science quotes that have been related to him. The complete article can be found here.

A few quotes that I really liked were :

"Chance favors the prepared mind."

"The universe is asymmetric. "

"Happy is he who bears a God within." 

"I am on the edge of mysteries and the veil is getting thinner and thinner." 

Enjoy !!!

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Computer Math Proof Shows Reasoning Power

A computer program written by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois has come up with a major mathematical proof that would have been called creative if a human had thought of it. In doing so, the computer has, for the first time, got a toehold into pure mathematics, a field described by its practitioners as more of an art form than a science. And the implications, some say, are profound, showing just how powerful computers can be at reasoning itself, at mimicking the flashes of logical insight or even genius that have characterized the best human minds.

Computers have found proofs of mathematical conjectures before, of course, but those conjectures were easy to prove. The difference this time is that the computer has solved a conjecture that stumped some of the best mathematicians for 60 years. And it did so with a program that was designed to reason, not to solve a specific problem. In that sense, the program is very different from chess-playing computer programs, for example, which are intended to solve just one problem: the moves of a chess game.
"It's a sign of power, of reasoning power," said Dr. Larry Wos, the supervisor of the computer reasoning project at Argonne. And with this result, obtained by a colleague, Dr. William McCune, he said, "We've taken a quantum leap forward."

Complete article here.

Contributed by: Paritosh Karnatak, IIT, Kanpur

©NY Times

Digital Circuits and Boolean Algebra

For people focusing on VLSI, digital logic and boolean algebra is not much too different. While Boolean algebra is a branch of mathematics and is named after its inventor "George Boole", its more realistic application, by utilizing electronic circuit elements like relays etc. was proposed by Claude Shannon, in his exceptional unpublished Masters Thesis (submitted 1937 at the age of 21) and published in 1940 at MIT. How many of us do really look forward to such a challenging work in a MS today? It was just so impressive that I could not resist writing about it and honoring such a great inventor/scientist. Looking back the inventor of digital logic in circuits did it when he was 21, at a point in his career when his creativity was all that he had. Thank you for such a wonderful contribution.


Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001), is also known as the "Father of Information Theory". Amongst his famous contributions are the following:

• Shannon-Hartley Theorem
• Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem
• Channel Capacity
• Shannon Index
• Shannon's Source Coding Theorem
• Shannon-Fano Coding
• A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, MS Thesis, MIT

Signing Off,

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US Patent for Three Terminal Semiconducting Device: October 1950

We all know that the transistor was a revolutionary invention. Something that has escalated tremendously in the last 5 decades. Its is just amazing to see how it was first made and how it has gone from there on. The intent was to build something magical to translate electrical signals, more simply what we now understand as the common usage of the term 'amplification'.

The Patent Application of the First Three Terminal Semiconductor Device, Bell Labs, 1950

The complete patent may be checked here.

Enjoy Reading !

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