Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Nerd History: Old Papers

Two really cool things caught my eye in the last week that may be of interest:

* Alex Bellos reprinted the entirety of Alan Turing's report cards. The young Turing, pictured above, was, among other things, fairly poor at Latin, not very tidy, and comes across, quite frankly, as someone who would never turn out to be as important as Alan Turing ended up being. We don't get to see this sort of thing very often, especially for someone of another era, so it's a neat little look into the life of Turing. Bellos also shared Turing's library list, which shows a very science-curious young man, quite the contrast from his marks from school.

* The Albert Einstein Archives are being digitized. I haven't had much of a chance to poke around in here yet, but there's a lot of cool stuff:

The documents — everything from personal letters to scientific manuscripts — are held by the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology.

Unsurprisingly, Einstein also struggled with school somewhat, having problems with authority. Nothing wrong with that, considering how he turned out.

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