Category Archives: Autobiographical

Er war einst groß in Spiel mit den Symbolen,

War viele Künste, viele Sprachen Meister,

War ein weltkundiger, ein weit gereister,

Berühmter Mann, gekannt bis zu den Polen,

Umgeben stets von Schülern und Kollegen.

Ein Fragment von den Gedichten des jungen Josef K.[1]

In my blog anniversary post yesterday I explained how I came to live in Germany; today in what is a sort of continuation of that post, I will explain how I came to evolve from a rank amateur deeply interested in the histories of mathematics and science into a full blown quasi-professional historian of science. This post is a tribute to the man who is responsible for that evolution, my friend, mentor and teacher Christian Thiel, who celebrates his eightieth birthday today.

Christian Thiel
Source: His Home page at Erlangen University

I tell a joke that when I first came to Germany I could only speak six words of German: ja, nein, bitte, danke, Bier and Scheiße. In reality this was almost the truth, so the first task I set myself, when I decided to stay, was to learn the language. As well as buying teach-yourself books, I also started attending German courses at the adult education evening classes in Nürnberg. These were actually very good but were, as far as I was concerned, far too slow and so I began to look around for alternatives. Somebody told me that the local university in Erlangen ran courses in German as a foreign language, so I trundled off to investigate. It turned out that to register for these courses I needed to apply for a place as a normal student at the university. Now I had dropped out of university in Cardiff ten years earlier, with the intention of returning to higher education when I had sorted out what it was that I really wanted to study, so I thought why not. I registered to become a maths student and was thus admitted to the German as a foreign language course.

I now spent a year learning German at the university in the mornings and working as an industrial cleaner in the afternoons. The course was very intensive, as the students are expected to be capable of taking a degree course in any academic subject in German at the end of it. To my own surprise I passed the course with flying colours and was now qualified to start my studies as a student of mathematics.

In those days the first degree in mathematics at the university of Erlangen was a diploma, equivalent of a master’s degree at an English university. Alongside the main subject students had to choose a subsidiary subject. In the 1970s I had become very interested in the philosophy of science and so I thought I would take a shot at that. One chair in the philosophy department was also offering a seminar in constructive geometry for the coming semester. I had no idea what constructive geometry was but it was an added incentive to choose philosophy as my subsidiary. The chair in question was one specialising in history and philosophy of science; I decided to go take a look see.

I found out when the professor held his office hours and went along at the appointed time. He wasn’t there. Knocking on his secretary’s door I asked when the professor would be there. She very kindly rang the professor and said that if I could wait, he would be along soon. I had waited maybe a quarter of an hour when I then met Christian Thiel for the first time. What I didn’t know was that it was not only my first semester as a student at the university but it was also Christian Thiel’s first semester as occupant of that chair. He, an Erlanger, had studied in Erlangen, taken his doctorate and his habilitation there but had then gone away to a chair elsewhere, as was normal in the German academic system. He was now returning to Erlangen to occupy the chair of his own mentor, Paul Lorenzen. What I also didn’t know at the time was that the department secretary had warned Christian Thiel that there was a ‘dangerous looking man’ waiting to see him. I was wearing a complete set of black motorcycle leathers, had my long hair tied back in a ponytail and sported three very prominent silver earrings, dangerous?

Christian Thiel wasn’t at all fazed by my dangerous appearance. We got on from the very first moment and were soon deep in a conversation about maths and the philosophy of science. In the time (ten years!) that I spent studying at Erlangen University more than fifty per cent of the courses that I took were with Christian Thiel. I think I learnt more from him than all of the other teachers that I have had in my life put together. He formed me, any abilities that I might possess as a historian of science I owe largely to Christian Thiel.

The maths department in Erlangen, when I studied, was not interested in the history of mathematics, my main motivation for studying the subject, Christian Thiel, however, was a historian of mathematics and mathematical logic, so after a time I dropped maths and became a student of philosophy with English philology and history as my subsidiaries. This move was also motivated by the fact that very early in my studies Christian Thiel, who obviously saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself, offered me, to my surprise, a position in a major research project into the social history (read external history) of formal logic. I learnt so much in that research project, probably more than in my official studies and it is here that I really became a genuine historian of science. I can’t say how much being offered that chance, as a student, to do real cutting edge historical research meant to me. Without it I would not be sitting here now writing this blog post.

As the title of this blog post says, ‘one man takes the credit, one man takes the blame’ and that man is Christian Thiel and I am very pleased to be able to write this brief tribute to him on my blog on the occasion of his eightieth birthday.

I should point out that this is not the first tribute that I have written to Christian Thiel. The German quote that opens this post is taken from my essay in the Festschrift[2] published in honour of his retirement twelve years ago. This in turn is loosely based on the speech I held at the conference in his honour in Altdorf in 2005. Nearly all of the lectures at the conference related to Christian Thiel as an academic researcher, I had the privilege of honouring Christian Thiel the teacher. There is not a little irony in this. Over the years Christian Thiel has taught many, many successful students, postgraduates and postdocs, I, however, am, so to speak, one of his failures, falling at the final fence and failing to graduate. I closed my speech and my essay with a simple phrase, which I’m going to repeat once again here.

“Thanks Chris, you have been a bloody good teacher.”

[1] A couple of words about the title and the opening quote to this post. The title is a line from Tom Lehrer’s song Lobachevsky. I would like to point out that whilst the title hero of the song has inspired the narrator to plagiarise, Christian Thiel actually taught me and all of his students the exact opposite. I chose the quote because a love of Tom Lehrer and of Hermann Hesse the source of the opening quote are two of the many things that I and Christian Thiel have in common. Das Glasperlenspiel, the source of the opening quote, is my favourite novel and when I set out to learn German, one of my aims was  to be able to read it in German one day. In Germany to become a professor a scholar has to do a sort of second doctorate called a habilitation. When the habilitation thesis has been graded and accepted the potential habilitant then has to hold a habilitation lecture in front of an audience of all of the habilitanten of his faculty. Thiel’s habilitation lecture was on Das Glasperlenspiel.

[2] Thony Christie, The Teacher in G. Löffladt (Hrsg), Mathematik – Logik – Philosophie: Ideen und ihre historischen Wechselwirkungen, Verlag Harri Deutsch, Frankfurt am Main, 2012

This post has nothing to do with the history of science, so if you come here just for that, you don’t need to read this.

I just had an exchange on the Internet with an acquaintance, who knows that I’m British (at least according to my passport) but had forgotten that I live in Germany. He suggested I would pay for something in pounds sterling and I pointed out that it would be Euro for me. His response was that many of us live away from home: he’s an Irishman who lives in America. This exchange reminded me of a post that I started to write but never finished and inspired me to finish it.

Recently the UK’s prime minister Theresa May said, “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world you’re a citizen of nowhere”. My immediate response, as a nominal British citizen, was the title of this post, because I have, I think, every reason to consider myself a citizen of the world. I will explain.

My father’s family were lowland Scots but he was born and brought up in London, although his parents made sure that he stayed in touch with his Scottish roots. My mother’s family were Northern Irish protestants but she was born in Rangoon in Burma, a third generation colonialist in British India, and spent the first thirty plus years of her life living in Burma and Northern India. Her family were tea planters. My brother, the eldest child of the family, was born in Lahore, at the time part of India today in Pakistan. My eldest sister was, like my mother, born in Rangoon, in fact in the same hospital. My father served in the Royal Indian Army during WWII, which is how he met my mother. She was the matron of the hospital where he was treated for malaria. After the war he became a civil servant and they settled down to life in India. However in 47/48, with independence they moved back to Britain, to Derbyshire. My younger sister was born in Buxton. In 1951 they moved to North-East Essex and I, for my sins, was born in Clacton-on Sea, although my parents lived in an agricultural village about seven miles inland, where I spent the first fifteen years of my life.

I then spent two years at boarding school in Colchester, Britain’s oldest city (or so they claim); living in central London in the school holidays. Having been thrown out of my boarding school, thank god, I spent one year living in central London and going to school in Holland Park. Having acquired a ropy set of A-levels I trundled off to Cardiff in Wales, which would be my main base for the next ten years. Whilst based in Cardiff I had periods of living in Brussels in Belgium and in Malmö in Southern Sweden. I have now lived in Middle Franconia in Southern Germany for thirty-seven years. Are you still paying attention at the back there?

I have a younger half sister (we share a father), who like her mother is Dutch, although her mother was born in Java and spent a substantial part of her childhood in a Japanese concentration camp. My half sister also has three mother tongues having grown up in England, Holland and Columbia. My step mother (not my half-sister’s mother), who is an fantastic lady and one of my best friends, is English but spent part of her childhood in the Middle East and as a young woman married an Indian and lived in Northern India for several years. Expelled from Burma following the war my mother’s family all moved to Western Australia where they thrived and prospered. I sometimes have the feeling that I’m related to half of the population of Perth. My brother’s daughter, my eldest niece, married an American, who she met in Munich when they were both working for Siemens, and now lives in Florida with her two charming American daughters.

I have lived in five different European countries – England, Wales (and don’t make the mistake of thinking England and Wales are the same country), Belgium, Sweden and Germany. Although I was born there, I was always regarded as an incomer in the conservative, rural, North-East Essex community where I grew up and after my mother died, when I was fifteen, I became effectively rootless, a vagabond whose home was wherever his bed was. In later life I have found a home in Middle Franconia, Erlangen is my Heimat, a German word, which is not really translatable; it means much more than simply home. However my true home for the last ten years has been the Internet and the readers of my blogs, the people I follow on social media and who follow me and the people I communicate with through comment columns and email come literally from all over the world. A day in which I converse with people from Australia, India, North and South America and half the countries of Europe is a normal day in my current life.

Although I now call Erlangen my Heimat, I still identify with North-East Essex where I grew up and first found my way in the world. I identify with the London of the late 1960s where I discovered sex and drugs and rock’n’roll. I identify with Cardiff and the ten years of my life that did most to shape the person that I am today. I identify with Brussels where I learnt for the first time what it means to live is a foreign culture, although I had a strong inkling of this from my time working with Welsh language theatre companies. I identify with Malmö, where I discovered both the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science and for the first time set myself the aim of becoming a historian and philosopher of science; an aim of which this blog is the end product. Being a historian of the subjects has also taught me that the evolution of mathematics, science, medicine and technology has never respected national, cultural, religious or language boundaries. I am drawn to Asia not only because it is where my mother came from but also because my father was a lecturer for art and archaeology of South-East Asia and I grew up as much on anecdotes of lands such as Viet Nam and Indonesia as any tales of European countries.

I am a historian of astronomy and all those who have looked up to the stars, rather than down to their feet, have always been awed by the vastness of space. On a cosmic scale we cling to the surface of a very small lump of rock, circling a comparatively small star, on the edge of a not particularly big galaxy of which there are a couple of zillion out there. For me national boundaries, counties, continents and whatever dividing lines people think up, and they are all of them artificial constructs, have very little substantive meaning. I am a citizen of the world and if that makes me a nowhere man then it’s a label that I wear with pride.

Theresa May’s comment, which sparked this mild tirade, has the stench of the parochial, racist tinged, xenophobia that is so typical of a certain strain of English thought. It is something that my truly cosmopolitan parents made me aware of, and also warned me about, from a very early age. It is an aspect of English society that I detest and reject with all my heart. My parent taught me to embrace the world and they taught me well. In my youth I was for many years first a Cub and then a Boy Scout, it was one of the few social activities for children in the village where I grew up. One of the Scout laws is (was?), ‘a scout is a brother to every other scout, no mater to what country, class or creed the other may belong’. I have tried to live by an extended version of that law, ‘a human is a sibling to every other human, no mater to what country, class or creed the other may belong. We’s all just humans baby!

Back in the 1970s I was for a time the manager (read general dogsbody) of the black box theatre space in the local arts centre. Early one morning we got asked if we could put on a poetry reading by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko on the same evening, the performance would be advertised during the day on the local BBC radio and by word of mouth on the culture grapevine. The theatre was free so I had no objections, they would have been overruled if I had had any. So it was agreed that we would go ahead with this almost spontaneous event.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

My preparations were not arduous, light the stage with some general background lighting and set up a couple of microphones. Come the afternoon and the great man appeared for a quick technical run through. As we met Yevgeny greeted me extremely warmly proclaiming, “You look just like my good friend Gary Snyder!” For those who don’t know, Gary Snyder is a Zen Buddhist Beat Poet and environmentalist who featured heavily in some of Jack Kerouac’s autobiographical novels. I was a big Kerouac and Gary Snyder fan and felt very chuffed by this warm greeting.

Come the evening the theatre was sold out and the poetry reading went without a hitch. Yevgeny would read, or better said perform one of his poems in Russian, he was a very expressive reader, and his lady translator, and bed partner, would then read her English translation. This was done with one exception; Yevgeny performed his own English translation of the poem The City of Yes and The City of No. An incredibly powerful performance.

Following the poetry reading the self appointed cultural elite of the city had organised a party to celebrate Yevgeny’s visit. I was grudgingly invited (you don’t invite the servants!), I suspect at Yevgeny’s insistence, and we all trooped off to the house of one of the literati. Now Yevgeny was not interested in being buttonholed by any of the literary groupies eager to have a conversation with the great poet, so he grabbed a glass of wine and proceeded to start an animated conversation with me about god and the world. And so the night continued, Yevgeny and I got wonderfully drunk and chewed the cud like long lost friends, whilst the literary groupies hovered, hoping to get at least a couple of words with the great man. When Yevgeny had drunk enough he made his excuses and left and I wended my way home, happily drunk, followed I suspect by the curses of the city’s self appointed cultural elite. That should have been the end of the story, one of many happy memories in a chaotic life full of weird turns and unexpected diversions, but…

Fast-forward forty years. In the small village where I live in Southern Germany one of my neighbours is a Russian lady (a nuclear submarine engineer, I kid you not!) who I got to know because we travelled into town on the same bus everyday. We became good friends and one day I discovered that she went to university with one of Yevgeny’s granddaughters and had often been in his apartment and knew him well. It is truly a small world as the cliché has it.

All of this means that I was saddened to learn this morning that Yevgeny Yevtushenko had died yesterday; another small element of my youth has gone.