Category History

Born on December 10, 1815, in London, England, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, is widely regarded as the first computer programmer. Lovelace worked closely with Charles Babbage, (credited with inventing the first mechanical computer), on his mechanical computer, the Analytical Engine. She recognised the potential of the machine to have applications beyond just calculations and published an algorithm intended to be carried out by it. As a result, she is considered the first computer programmer.

Lovelace paved the way for computer programmers of the future, who are now programming the computer to learn by itself, a process known as machine learning.

“That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal, as time will show.”

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Durga Puja might be over but celebrations aren’t over in the the city of joy – Kolkata. The city celebrated its sixth Nobel Laureate with Abhijit Banerjee being awarded the prestigious award for his contribution to economics.
In fact, one of the most prestigious universities of the city – Presidency College has in itself brought out two Nobel Laureates including Banerjee.
Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and fellow economist Michael Kremer, won the Nobel Prize for Economics. A native of Kolkata, Banerjee, who happens to be married to Duflo, did his schooling and college here in the city.

The son of two economics professors, Nirmala Banerjee and Dipak Banerjee, he studied at South Point school and then attended Presidency College (now Presidency University). He completed his Masters from Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

The students of South Point and Presidency University are understandably ecstatic and have been celebrating the achievement of their alumnus. Meanwhile, congratulatory messages continue to flood the Banerjee household in Kolkata.

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On February 2, 1835, British politician Thomas Babington Macaulay circulated Minute on Education, a treatise that offered definitive reasons for why the East India Company and the British government should spend money on the provision of English language education, as well as the promotion of European learning, especially the sciences, in India.

While The Minute acknowledged the historic role of Sanskrit and Arabic literature in the Subcontinent, it also contended that they had limitations. “A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,” Macaulay wrote in the Minute.

A month after its circulation, the Minute became policy, when William Bentinck, the governor general of India, signed the resolution. For Macaulay, this was a victory. He had won against his detractors, especially the Orientalists – East India Company officials, scholars, translators and collectors – who supported study and instruction in India in Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian languages.

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On 50 BCE, Julius Caesar conquered Gaul (ancient France) and Britain was also conquered about a century later by the emperor Claudius. As a result, this large Celtic-speaking area was absorbed by Rome, Latin became the dominant language, and the Continental Celtic languages eventually died out. The chief Continental language was Gaulish.

The modern Romance languages developed from the spoken Latin of various parts of the Roman Empire. During the Middle Ages and until comparatively recent times, Latin was the language most widely used in the West for scholarly and literary purposes. Until the latter part of the 20th century its use was required in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church.

The oldest example of Latin extant, perhaps dating to the 7th century BCE, consists of a four-word inscription in Greek characters on a fibula, or cloak pin. It shows the preservation of full vowels in unstressed syllables—in contrast to the language in later times, which has reduced vowels. Early Latin had a stress accent on the first syllable of a word, in contrast to the Latin of the republican and imperial periods, in which the accent fell on either the next or second to the last syllable of a word.

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The translations of One Thousand and One Nights have been made into virtually every major language of the world. They began with the French translation by Antoine Galland (titled Les mille et une nuits, finished in 1717). Galland’s translation was essentially based on a medieval Arabic manuscript of Syrian origins, supplemented by oral tales recorded by him in Paris from a Maronite Arab from Aleppo named Hanna Diyab.

The first English translation appeared in 1706 and was made from Galland’s version; being anonymous, it is known as the Grub Street edition. It exists in two known copies kept in the Bodleian Library and in the Princeton University Library. Since then several English reissues appeared simultaneously in 1708. As early as the end of the 18th century the English translation based on Galland was brought to Halifax, Montreal, Philadelphia, New York and Sydney. Galland-based English translations were superseded by that made by Edward William Lane in 1839–41. In the 1880s an unexpurgated and complete English translation, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, was made by Richard Francis Burton.

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James Prinsep, (born August 20, 1799, County of Essex, England—died April 22, 1840, London), antiquary and colonial administrator in India, the first European scholar to decipher the edicts of the ancient Indian emperor Ashoka.

Prinsep was appointed to the Calcutta (Kolkata) mint in 1819 but left to become assay master (1820–30) at the Benares (Varanasi) mint. He returned to the Calcutta mint as assay master in 1832, leaving in 1838 for England because of ill health. As secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (from 1832), he had access to and developed the study of the largest collection of Indian coins then existing.

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