Friday 15 January 2016

Essays on Scientists in New Indian Express

In December, VR Devika of Aseema recommended my name to the editor of The Week,  to write an article on Aryabhata for their anniversary special issue "History of India through 25 people."

A week back, Venkatasubramanian Ramamurthy asked me to begin a series of weekly essays for the online edition of New Indian Express. The series is titled, "Shoulders of Giants". The first essay is on Alfred Russel Wallace, the great biologist, who discovered Evolution and it's primary mechanism, Natural Selection,  almost simultaneously with Charles Darwin, but sadly remains in the latter's shadow.

My blog is titled Ajivaka Wallacian, partly after Wallace.  When I wrote about the Wallace Line in an email a few years back, Badri Seshadri urged me to start a blog and not confine myself to emails.

I start a different blog in 2007 but only wrote a few articles, then gave it up. I decided to start this blog in 2012, on the day the Mayan calendar reset itself. I didn't know then that the two hundredth birthday of Wallace followed shortly on January 2013. What a sad state of affairs, that it was not celebrated by biologists with great fanfare. It would be a while before I wrote of Wallace and the Birds of Paradise, in Tamil.

My first public essay in my blog was about Haber and Bosch and their invention of a brilliant process to extract nitrogen from the air and make artificial fertilizer. It will be my second essay in the Express series, next week.

I'm grateful to Venkatasubramanian (RVS) for the opportunity to write for the Express! That too on science!

Links

1. Shoulders of Giants - New Indian Express Series Page
2. New Indian Express Esssay on Alfred Russel Wallace
3. On Aryabhata - essay in The Week
4. ஆல்ஃப்ரெட் ரஸ்ஸல்  வாலஸ் - தமிழ் கட்டுரை
5. A year of my blog
6. What Avvai didn't say - my older blog

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