The History Hunt

[Fig]

EDIT from Hallow♥: This thread has been closed due to age, post numbers, and inactivity.

The rules of this game are simple. When it is your turn, you will post 3 to 5 pictures, which ALL much have be linked to a common historical figure. For example, if my historical figure was Thomas Hobbes (philosopher), I could post a picture of the biblical creature, the Leviathan (which is also the title of one of Hobbes' books), a picture of his birthplace (or a monument of the city he was born in), and a picture of the creator of Calvin and Hobbes.

Once this post is made, the other players must attempt to guess the identity of the person. Once it is guessed correctly, the person who guessed get to post his or her own pictorial clues.

A (relatively) easy one to begin with :

 

[GrnMarvl14]

I'm sure this is wrong, but I just have to take a guess...I'm compelled to.

Is it Samuel de Champlain?

 

[Fig]

Nope.

Clues :
The first is something he WORKED FOR.
The second is somewhere he LIVED (but FAR, VERY far from wher he was born).
The third is someone he INSPIRED
The fourth is something he FOUGHT

 

[Barb]

Napoleon Bonaparte?

 

[Barb]

Got it.

William Adams, who served under Sir Francis Drake. He sailed from Rotterdam to the Far East in 1598, finally arriving in Kyushu, Japan, in 1600. He was eventually given the privileges of a samurai and renamed Miura Anjin, becoming the first foreign samurai. He was the inspiration for James Clavell's novel Shogun.

 

[Fig]

Yup.

The flag is the Dutch flag.
The picture is of Yokosuka, Japan, where he lived for part of his life (or near where).
The person is James Clavell.
The fleet is the spanish armada.

Your turn, Barb

 

[Barb]

This should be fairly easy:

 

[Murgatroyd]

Let's see...
We've got something written in cuneiform, the site of Babylon, and the Supreme Court of the United States.
I'm going to guess Hamurabbi

 

[Barb]

Your guess is correct.

 

[Murgatroyd]

This one shouldn't be too hard.

 

[Zhen Lin]

I see:

2D projection of a tesseract. (My favourite 2D projection, in fact.)

A diagram of the refraction of a light beam.

Andrew Wiles, the man who finally proved Fermat's Last Theorem (OT: the history of it, as a blog), by way of proving a special case of the Taniyama-Shimura theorem.

......

I'm sorry, I really can't draw the connection between optics and {Andrew Wiles, tesseract}. The connection between Andrew Wiles and the tesseract is clear enough - the Taniyama-Shimura theorem revolves [no pun intended] around elliptic curves and modular forms, both of which can be represented in hyperbolic space [though, IIRC, the theorem only concerns elliptic curves over rational numbers?] - in which the tesseract resides. One failed proof of Fermat's Last Theorem also involved hyperbolic space.

Anyway. So... perhaps it has something to do with the history of Fermat's Last Theorem. Perhaps I need to find a physicist who contributed to optics, among the mathematicians who were involved.

Perhaps it's Monsieur Pierre de Fermat himself... Fermat's principle?

 

[Murgatroyd]

I see:

2D projection of a tesseract. (My favourite 2D projection, in fact.)

A diagram of the refraction of a light beam.

Andrew Wiles, the man who finally proved Fermat's Last Theorem (OT: the history of it, as a blog), by way of proving a special case of the Taniyama-Shimura theorem.

......

I'm sorry, I really can't draw the connection between optics and {Andrew Wiles, tesseract}. The connection between Andrew Wiles and the tesseract is clear enough - the Taniyama-Shimura theorem revolves [no pun intended] around elliptic curves and modular forms, both of which can be represented in hyperbolic space [though, IIRC, the theorem only concerns elliptic curves over rational numbers?] - in which the tesseract resides. One failed proof of Fermat's Last Theorem also involved hyperbolic space.

Anyway. So... perhaps it has something to do with the history of Fermat's Last Theorem. Perhaps I need to find a physicist who contributed to optics, among the mathematicians who were involved.

Perhaps it's Monsieur Pierre de Fermat himself... Fermat's principle?

Correct, it's Pierre de Fermat.

The connection of the tesseract to Fermat is more direct than the one you've constructed.
Cubem autem in duos cubos, aut quadratoquadratum in duos quadratoquadratos...

 

[Zhen Lin]

Well, yes, of course.

Here's a more difficult one, I suppose.

About clue 3 & 4: the ideas represented therein are analogous. Clue 3 is more relevant, though clue 4 is not entirely irrelevant...

 

[Fig]

I see :

The Rosetta Stone
Thomas Young
A picture containing egyptian words and their greek translation.
A picture containing chinesse words and their english translation.

My answer : Jean-François Champollion.
He translated the Rosetta Stone
Expanded the works of Thomas Young on the topic
And his translation rested on the fact that the Rosetta Stone was written in multiple languages (importantly enough, Greek and Egyptian)

 

[Zhen Lin]

Yes, it is him.

What he discovered that enabled him to make the breakthrough was this: hieroglyphs, like kanji, were not pictures with some sort of inherent meaning, many of them were built around the [wp=rebus]rebus[/wp] principle - spelling words by using other words that sound similar. He was one of the first to dare to suggest that most hieroglyphic writing was based on this principle.

Thomas Young [clue 2] steadfastly refused to believe this - he assumed that they only used it in spelling out 'foreign' words and names, like the cartouches of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, which he had deciphered.