39 lines
4.0 KiB
TeX
39 lines
4.0 KiB
TeX
\section{Some Seem Born with Longing}
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\lettrine{S}{ome} seem born with Longing. We encounter figures of extraordinary productivity who, as far as we can discern, simply arrived in the world already reaching.
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\subsubsection{Mozart}
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756--1791) composed over 600 works across every major genre --- symphonies, concertos, operas, chamber music, sacred music --- in a career that lasted barely thirty years. He composed with an extraordinary, seemingly effortless fluency.
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He died at thirty-five in Vienna, poor and professionally frustrated by the politics of patronage. But the Longing that drove him to the pen seems to have been native to him from earliest childhood.
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\subsubsection{Euler}
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Leonhard Euler (``OIL-er,'' 1707--1783) produced more important mathematics than any single human before or since --- over 800 papers and books. A body of work so vast that scholars are still publishing his complete works more than two centuries after his death — in part because to properly edit and annotate them, they must first be understood.
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He worked across number theory, topology, graph theory, mechanics, astronomy, and a dozen other domains with the same relentless productivity. And although the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter had been known for millennia, Euler popularized calling it ``π''.
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Euler was born in Basel in 1707, trained under the Bernoulli family (a dynasty of mathematicians), and spent most of his career in St. Petersburg and Berlin, embedded in the intellectual courts of Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great. He fathered thirteen children, maintained an astonishing correspondence, and continued publishing at full capacity even after going blind in both eyes --- a condition that, by his own account, barely slowed him. His life was peripatetic but not tragic. He simply never stopped working.
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\subsubsection{Curie}
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Marie Curie (1867--1934) was born in Warsaw, Poland, at a time when women were barred from Polish universities. She studied secretly in underground classes, then made her way to Paris, where she earned degrees in both physics and mathematics --- often the only woman in her lecture halls, frequently too poor to heat her apartment.
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She discovered two new elements, polonium and radium, working in a leaky shed with primitive equipment. She coined the term ``radioactivity.'' She won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 --- shared with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel --- and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911, this time hers alone, becoming the only person ever to win in two different sciences. The French Academy of Sciences refused to admit her. She was a woman.
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She continued working with radioactive materials long after the damage to her health was unmistakable. Her laboratory notebooks are stored in lead-lined boxes in Paris. Anyone wishing to handle them must sign a liability waiver and wear protective clothing. They will remain radioactive for another 1,500 years.
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She died in 1934 from aplastic anemia caused by decades of radiation exposure.
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\subsubsection{Ramanujan}
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Srinivasa Ramanujan (``rah-MAH-nu-jan,'' 1887--1920) was born in a small town in Tamil Nadu, India, to a Brahmin family of modest means.
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He taught himself mathematics from a single borrowed book
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(a survey of advanced mathematics)
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and developed an extraordinary intuition for number theory without formal training or peer community.
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He simply ``knew'' astonishing mathematical insights without deriving them — as though the numbers spoke to him directly.
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He corresponded with the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy (a world-class mathematician of his day).
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Hardy recognized in Ramanujan's work a kind of mathematical genius he had never encountered — not learned, not reasoned like you're ``supposed to,'' but intuited seemingly out of thin air.
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Ramanujan came to Cambridge, where his collaboration with Hardy flourished and produced proofs of stunning originality.
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He died in 1920 at thirty-two, likely from tuberculosis exacerbated by the English climate and the strain of displacement from home.
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