Finding Your Families

  The Nuremberg Trials Friday, 20 November 2020, is the 75th anniversary of the start of the International Tribunal in Nuremberg, usually called the Nuremberg Trials. These were so important to the future of Europe that I want to tell the story of one man. Birth Just over 27 years before this, in 1918, a boy was born in Alexandria, Egypt. His parents were Irish and Romanian by birth. His father’s family had come from rural Ireland in Queen’s County (now County Laois), migrating over generations to County Westmeath from where great uncles fled the Great Hunger (known as the Irish Potato Famine) to the USA, to County Carlow, and finally to Dublin where his father was born. His father became a lieutenant in the Egypt Labour Corps (ELC) where he met his future wife in Alexandria through one of her brothers who was also an officer in the ELC. His mother’s family had come from Romania where they were originally of Ashkenazi Jewish extraction. Her father had been baptised a Christian while re

Annie Jean Eastley 1933 - 2011   Continuing with Black History Month this blog post celebrates the life and work of Annie Easley (1933-2011) . Annie Jean Easley helped make modern spaceflight possible. Her work at NASA (and its predecessor NACA) as a computer scientist, mathematician, and rocket scientist laid the technological foundations that future space launches, including the Cassini satellite destined to explore Saturn, relied upon. She was born on 23 Apr 1933 in Birmingham Alabama. This was before the US Civil Rights Act, which meant that, as a black person, her education and career opportunities were very limited, and she had to make the best of every chance she got. She was raised by a single mother who encouraged her that she could do anything she wanted as long as she worked at it. After graduating top of her year at high school, she studied pharmacy in New Orleans (she did not graduate), returning to Birmingham when she was 21 to work as a supply teacher. In between teachi

    October is Black History Month. Being a history of science nerd I shall celebrate this by sharing a few selected snippets about African science and mathematics. This week, some notes about aspects of African astronomy you probably didn’t know. The Dogons of Mali The Dogon people of Mali live on the western edge of the Sahara desert, and their oral traditions state that for thousands of years they have known that the Earth revolves round the sun, Jupiter has moons, Saturn has a ring, and that Sirius has a companion star (a fact not known in the West until 1862). It is thought they brought this knowledge with them as they migrated west from Egypt, keeping it hidden from outsiders until the 1950s. So sure were they about Sirius that they based their calendar on the 50 year orbit of Sirius B and Sirius A. The Stone Circle at Nabta Playa Contrary to popular belief Europeans weren’t the first to make predictions from astronomical observations. Further east of Mali at Nabta Playa