Word: hogben
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...Mathematics for the Million) Hogben, professor of medical statistics at Britain's University of Birmingham, Wonderful World is a fast-paced history of the subject from the days when people "thought of any quantity greater than three as a heap or pile'' to the age of Albert Einstein...
...Author Hogben's purpose is not to teach his young readers their algebra, but to show how man built up his world of signs and symbols to solve the problems of his everyday existence and then to expand his civilization. He starts with the sun and the moon, man's first clocks and calendars, and with the notches that the shepherd cut when counting his flock. Then come the calendar keepers, the powerful group who could tell people when to plant crops. Later men developed more complicated desires. The farmer wanted to know how much land...
Interplanetary News. Teaching the Neighbors a system of numerals Hogben calls his "fresher" (freshman) course. For his sophomore course he casts about for some other topic that earthlings have in common with their Neighbors. The best one, he thinks, is astronomy. The "Venetians" (inhabitants of Venus), who supposedly live at the bottom of an opaque atmosphere, may know nothing about the sky, but the Martians should. Their atmosphere is clearer than the earth...
...start his sophomore course, Hogben goes back again to the early days of human intellectual development. The first body of scientific knowledge that most cultures accumulated was data on the calendar (the apparent motion of the sun) and on the motion of the planets. So human astronomers should first work out the dates of such events as they are experienced on Mars. Sent across space in the language of numbers as "interplanetary news items," they should be easily recognized by the Martians...
...Hogben is also famous in England as an extreme example of the peculiar professor, who forgets his own birthday and talks indistinctly, with his eyes shut tight. This sort of thing has attracted the attention of the bobbies. During a recent trial, when Hogben was acquitted of drunken driving, a friendly colleague testified: "There is no other man I know more likely to be mistaken for a drunken man when he is quite sober...