May 2023 – According to The Kidd

GHOST STORY 22 – Wartime Ghosts

KOREAN WAR MEMORIAL, BRAMPTON, ONTARIO
By https://www.flickr.com/people/imuttoo/ – Ian Muttoo – https://www.flickr.com/photos/imuttoo/2871669136/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14795191

A series of posts about important people long ago whose names are either forgotten, or were never well-known in the first place. The posts may also deal with little known aspects of the lives of famous people no longer alive.

NO HEROICS PLEASE

Given my politics it may sound surprising, but the most ethical man I have ever met was a military officer in the Royal Canadian Regiment. He also happened to be my father-in-law. Most of this post will be specifically about him and his family, and his highly unusual life, but first a paragraph about the Canadian military for context.

The heavy emphasis at Canadian Remembrance Day ceremonies is on the hellishness of war, how sometimes it is a necessary evil. The psychological ravages of war are openly acknowledged. There is no talk of glorious heroics or of winning imperialistic wars. The ceremonies are multi-lingual, secular, and participatory, and there is as much respect for the stellar reputation of Canadian peacekeepers (whose job is to get in the way of lethal force without retaliation) as there is for the fighting units. The Father of Modern Peacekeeping is Nobel Peace Laureate and former Prime Minister of Canada Lester B. Pearson. The Canadian government thinks long and hard before entering a conflict, refusing to fight in the Iraq War initiated by President Bush in 2003, as well as refusing to fight in the Vietnam War in the 1960’s. Prime Minister Trudeau (the first one, Pierre), vocally opposed the war and mocked President Nixon for fighting it, and Nixon hated Pierre with a vengeance for doing so (Pierre was also a friend of Fidel Castro, visiting Cuba often with his family, including young Justin Trudeau. That may have also infuriated Nixon).

PRIME MINISTER LESTER B. PEARSON (FAR RIGHT) WITH THREE OF HIS CABINET MINISTERS ALL OF WHOM LATER BECAME PRIME MINISTERS AS WELL – FROM LEFT TO RIGHT PIERRE TRUDEAU, JOHN TURNER AND JEAN CHRETIEN.
Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2004849

WARRANT OFFICER (LATER CAPTAIN) LEO AUSTIN ‘RED’ JOHNSON (1915 – 2014)

My wife Margaret’s mother was a member of the Canadian armed forces and several other family members were also in the armed forces. Of all the military personnel in my wife’s family, however, the most noteworthy, was her father Warrant Officer Leo Austin ‘Red’ Johnson, a career soldier. I’ve heard many a conversation between military people and they don’t talk about fighting and killing and dying. They talk about the cook who never washed his hands, or about the elaborate practical jokes the rank and file used to play on each other in order to maintain their sanity.

A LANCE CORPORAL OF THE CANADIAN ARMY BEING TENDED TO IN THE NORWEGIAN ARMY SURGICAL HOSPITAL DURING THE KOREAN WAR, JANUARY 1951
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=522335

LITTLE GIBRALTAR

The battle that raged on Hill 355 during the Korean War came to be known as the Battle of Little Gibraltar to the Canadians who fought and died there. As both sides entered the area at first there was a stalemate with the Chinese using loudspeakers to tell their enemy “Hilltop is grave. Surrender to live”, but nothing much was happening. In October 1952 all that changed. The Chinese forces became much more aggressive and were closing in. It quickly became impossible to withdraw and reorganize. Then several of the command leaders of Company A were incapacitated so CSM Johnson (he was Company Sergeant-Major at the time) stepped up and fought with particular courage and expertise under lengthy and intense fire. The Chinese bombardment continued for almost a fortnight but Johnson and his fellow soldiers kept the Chinese at bay and he maintained order and kept morale high despite almost no sleep. He and his fellow troops managed to halt the Chinese advance long enough until relief arrived in the form of E Company. The Canadians prevailed on Hill 355.

THE KOREAN WAR – FIGHTING IN SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA, SEPT. 1950, AS UN TROOPS ROUND UP NORTH KOREAN PRISONERS OF WAR
By Unknown author or not provided – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16457573

Here is a reference to this action from the official history of the Royal Canadian Regiment (Volume Two, page 253): “CSM L.A. Johnson of A Company, CSM Richard McNally of D Company and CSM G.M. Fox of E Company all showed outstanding qualities of leadership throughout the battle”. For his leadership under fire Johnson was personally awarded The Military Medal by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh himself. E Company was led by a man named CSM George Fox. As it turned out Johnson and Fox were friends. Leo Johnson was the father of the bride at our wedding and George Fox was in attendance. Years later I had occasion to visit George, then in his nineties, and I noticed on his wall he kept a large VRI symbolic of The Royal Canadian Regiment, Leo and George both being members of the RCR.

PRINCE PHILIP VISITING CANADA IN 1951 WITH QUEEN ELIZABETH TWO YEARS BEFORE SHE BECAME QUEEN – PRIME MINISTER LOUIS ST. LAURENT IS ON THE RIGHT
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=522335

Leo Johnson (who I knew as Red though his red hair had turned silver long since) rarely talked about the war but it never left him. One night his young daughter, later my wife, accidentally woke him up suddenly in the middle of the night and he reflexively struck out catching himself at the last minute before she was hurt. On his death bed shortly before his ninety-ninth birthday Red was also back in Korea evading bombs he thought were exploding in the hospital corridor. The few times he talked about his army career he talked about liking the people of Korea, about good times with an impressive set of Australian soldiers in Korea. He didn’t talk about his own gallantry or the privations of war. Red was also very mischievous and usually had a grin on his face and a wonderful story to tell. He has passed his finely honed storytelling skills on to his daughter Margaret.

To be sure, Red had his imperfections and his blind spots, and was to some extent a product of his time, but he was also a feminist without realizing it, unheard of in his day, quite happy having his wife Marjorie (also a military officer) lead a somewhat independent existence, travelling the world on her own, while raising two children. Red baked the cake at his daughter Margaret’s christening, and he did the housework when his wife was in hospital. He was proud of her determination to pull herself out of grinding poverty, and he wasn’t afraid to tell people how much he admired her intelligence and spirit. More than once Red also expressed particular admiration for the women who historically took the lash and the beatings as they stood in the way of men physically mistreating animals. He also commented sadly on the fact that a man who beat his dog would never be welcome in a foursome of golf, but a man who beat his wife would be deemed acceptable.

CAPTAIN SYL APPS WITH A SMALLER STANLEY CUP 1942
By Unknown author – [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4651209

Red was an honest, highly-principled, very logical man. He was very good at Statistics and he read and was able to understand some of Margaret’s more advanced statistical work. He was widely-read politically and kept up on all the current news well into his nineties. He was an excellent athlete, excelling in lacrosse, baseball, hockey and golf. He actually achieved an impressive fourteen witnessed holes in one playing golf over the years. We shared a fondness for the Toronto Maple Leafs, trading stories about Johnny Bower, Frank Mahovlich, Red Kelly and Tim Horton back when the Leafs were regularly winning Stanley Cups. Red once played on the same minor hockey team as the legendary Maple Leafs Captain Syl Apps, for heaven’s sake. Red loved animals and had strong feelings about cruelty to animals. He was also a deeply religious Roman Catholic man who nonetheless thought Pope Benedict XVI should step down, voluntarily or otherwise, due to the cover-up by the church of child sexual abuse perpetrated by some members of the clergy. He was solidly, proudly and determinedly working class all his life. He was a religious man in the military with no interest in music, and he knew I was about as opposite of that as one could get, yet he was open-minded enough to judge me by my behaviour and we got along fine. We had many long walks and talks together after his wife died and I treasure the fact that he once bestowed upon me his highest, and rarely bestowed, honour by quietly pronouncing me “solid”.

There’s very little to tell on my side of the family. My own father was a bandleader whose big band played on cruise ships across the Great Lakes and whose jazz combo played in nightclubs across Ontario in the 1930’s and 1940’s. He was a multi-instrumentalist and a composer, and since he was also a pilot he enlisted in the Canadian armed forces during World War Two and before long he was leading an armed forces band entertaining the troops and he even did some armed forces radio broadcasting (after the war he also had his own local radio show in London). My mother was also enlisted, and the two of them were married in uniform in an army camp during World War Two. In our family we never talked about things. I discovered most of this information after their deaths.

DEATH IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC

HMS JERVIS BAY, 1940
By Photo by JF Aylard, survivor. – Trevor Reeve and Joe Marriott from HMS Jervis Bay Assosiation Contact Details: http://hmsjervisbay.com/ContactUs.php, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32285300

On Guy Fawkes Day every year my wife and I raise a toast. Not to Guy Fawkes (though, as they say, he was the only man to ever enter the British Houses of Parliament with honest intentions). We toast the men of HMS Jervis Bay, a British convoy escort ship sunk by the German heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer on November 5, 1940 under extraordinary circumstances. We toast the men of the Jervis Bay because my wife has a personal connection with that ship.

THE GHOSTS OF HMS JERVIS BAY

The Jervis Bay was launched in 1922. When World War Two broke out the ship was requisitioned by the Royal Navy as a member of the Merchant Marine, armed with seven BL 152 mm guns and Two QF 76.2 mm guns and sent off to fight the Hun. The ship’s function was to escort convoys in the North Atlantic and in the case of enemy action to do all it can to protect the convoy. On one occasion a convoy of thirty-eight ships encountered a German ship, the Admiral Scheer, about 1398 Kilometres south south-west of Reykjavik, Iceland. In response Captain Fegen of the Jervis Bay ordered the convoy to scatter, and steered the Jervis Bay directly at the Admiral Scheer to draw its fire. The Jervis Bay was completely out-ranged and outgunned by the German ship’s 28 cm guns but it kept going toward the enemy ship anyway in order to distract its fire. The Admiral Scheer’s firepower utterly destroyed the Jervis Bay, Fegen was badly wounded, and many of his men died. Fegen and the surviving crew fought on until their ship was finally sunk and Captain Fegen and the remaining crew, went down with the ship.

The sacrifice of the Jervis Bay allowed most of the convoy to escape. Of the crew of 254 on the Jervis Bay 68 survived, picked up by the neutral ship ‘Stureholm’ out of Sweden. Of those 68 three died shortly after of their wounds. Captain Fegen was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest honour that can be bestowed on someone in the military in the entire British Commonwealth.

PLAQUE AT THE ROYAL BURGH OF WICK, NORTHERN SCOTLAND, MEMORIALIZING THE LOST CREW MEMBERS OF THE JERVIS BAY FROM WICK AND VICINITY
By Flaxton – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3929968

My wife Margaret’s mother, Marjorie, before she met and married Leo Johnson, met one of the crewman of the Jervis Bay, Carpenter’s Mate H.S.G. Lang. Lang, being a carpenter, made a wooden jewelry box for Marjorie and carved her initials into the top. But Lang did not survive the sinking of the Jervis Bay. We also have a photograph of a very young Marjorie MacDermott (her maiden name) with two service men – one is Carpenter’s Mate Lang, and the other is Marjorie’s brother Ralph who was a telegrapher on another convey escort ship patrolling the North Atlantic. Convoy escort duty was a gruelling experience. Not only was death pretty much a daily possibility, but the experience wreaked havoc on one’s health. Margaret’s uncle Ralph had to have more than one hip replacement later as a result of his wartime duty. When Marjorie died she passed the jewelry box on to her daughter Margaret and we still have it in our possession. May the 183 ghosts of the Jervis Bay rest in peace.

For a complete account of this incident, and a celebrated painting illustrating the scene – https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-heroic-death-of-the-hms-jervis-bay/

GHOST STORY 21 – Riding the Rails

A series of posts about important people (and trains) long ago whose names are either forgotten, or were never well-known in the first place. The posts may also deal with little known aspects of the lives of famous people (and trains) no longer alive.

THE FLYING SCOTSMAN 1862 – 1962
By http://www.nrm.org.uk/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4076017

There are many famous trains from the Wabash Cannonball to the Orange Blossom Special and the Hogwarts Express, some of which are no longer in service. This is about some real trains no longer in operation – ghost trains.

Imagine being very young and coming across a steam locomotive, a giant, loud, imposing metal creation belching smoke like a dragon, giant wheels ready to turn, so powerful that once it gets going it is able to pull a long line of large heavy cars full of people or freight. It is not surprising that such a phenomenon is enough to inspire fascination in a child. Some trains have more than one hundred carriages. On top of that, trains are things that can take one to exotic places, to cities full of enormous skyscrapers, across breathtaking bridges, winding through majestic mountain ranges.

When I was a small child many Canadian children had a Lionel model electric train set. My best friend, Tommy, was one of those children. His train set was laid out in his basement on an immense piece of plywood which had been painted green, but also had material stuck to the surface to emulate grass and shrubbery. In one back corner was what seemed to me to be an enormous mountain and the train track was designed to tunnel through the base of the mountain. There was all manner of tiny detailed houses and shops, people and animals, and of course a train station. The train was pulled by a heavy black steam locomotive and you could put small pellets into the smokestack which would then project smoke out of the top. There was a variety of railway cars with coupling devices so you could rearrange them – boxcars, flatcars, tank cars and stock cars. We were the giants looking down on the trains under our control, and we spent many happy hours playing with his trains, but I never had a set of my own.

GHOST TRAIN – GARY BROOKER – an excellent piece of music with some wonderful graphics – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD6vjeR6hGo&ab_channel=Marbeat

THE FLYING SCOTSMAN

In the nineteenth century, before cars and planes, trains were the main long distance form of mass transit and therefore they had an enormous impact on the economic prosperity of a nation. Trains opened up isolated regions creating markets previously inaccessible. Train travel has many obvious benefits. How many people can you get onto a train? If all those people instead travelled by car think of their environmental impact compared to the impact made by the train. Compare the effect on the environment made by a commercial jet aircraft compared with a train. Then there are the monster ocean-going ships like the Deepwater Horizon which in 2010 discharged 780 000 cubic metres (210 000 000 U.S. gallons) of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

There is an entire cultural world surrounding trains, and some people (including my Uncle Doug) even enjoyed trainspotting. There was the book The Little Engine That Could that we all had read to us as small children, Thomas the Tank Engine (by Wilbert and Christopher Awdry) and the 1905 novel ‘The Railway Children (by Edith Nesbit). Later there was ‘The Polar Express’ (book and film) by Chris Van Allsburg. Alice in Chapter 3 of ‘Through the Looking Glass’ by Lewis Carroll travels by train, a train in fact capable of leaping over brooks. The Beatles travel by train from Liverpool to London in much of their first and best film ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. Michael Palin (of Monty Python) is an enthusiastic train aficionado himself; he narrated a documentary on trains, and travelled on the Orient Express in his ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ series. Trains are everywhere.

THE FLYING SCOTSMAN IN YORK 2016
By Geof Sheppard – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55267572

Perhaps the most famous train running back in the 19th century was the Flying Scotsman, an express passenger train operating between Edinburgh and London. The service began in 1862 and before long it was one of two railway lines travelling on the east and west coasts of Britain in what became known unofficially as the Race to the North. The first locomotive to pull The Flying Scotsman was an engine called the Stirling 4-2-2 Singles’ engine, which had to be powerful because the train was long and heavy before the days of automobile and air transport. It was called a Single because it had a single pair of large driving wheels, and it was designed by Patrick Stirling. All the engines of this type were phased out by 1916, however, turning them into ghost engines.

THE FLYING SCOTSMAN – NICOLA STURGEON AND DAVID HORNE, 2015
By George Newnes – Internet Archive identifier, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110615095

In the television series ‘Thomas and Friends’, one of the characters, Emily, is a Stirling 4-2-2 Singles engine. In the film ‘Case Closed: The Phantom of Baker Street’ the protagonists confront Jack the Ripper on top of a Stirling Single Engine.

THE ORIENT EXPRESS

“The great trains are going out all over Europe, one by one, but still, three times a week, the Orient Express thunders superbly over the 1400 miles of glittering steel track between Istanbul and Paris.” This is the opening sentence of Chapter 21 of ‘From Russia With Love’, a James Bond novel by Ian Fleming published in 1957. The novel reaches its climax on the Orient Express as Bond wins a fight to the death with the villain Red Grant. ‘From Russia With Love’ is based on a true incident on the Orient Express which Fleming, who worked for British Intelligence, was aware of. It seems a U.S. Naval attaché and secret agent named Eugene Karp working out of Budapest, Hungary, in 1950 took the Orient Express from Budapest to Paris. He had with him secret documents about blown American spy networks in the Eastern Bloc. Travelling with him on the train, however, was a team of Soviet assassins. They drugged the conductor and shortly after that Karp’s corpse was discovered in a railway tunnel south of Salzburg. Fleming used trains as part of the plot in three other Bond novels as well – ‘Live and Let Die’, ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ and ‘The Man With the Golden Gun’.

The Orient Express was a long distance passenger train that began service in 1883 but ceased in 2009, thus becoming a ghost train alongside the ghost of Bond villain Red Grant, not to mention the ghost of Ian Fleming and Sean Connery.

THE ORIENT EXPRESS
By Subomondo – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63198921

One of Agatha Christie’s most popular novels, ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, published in 1934, features one of the more unusual ways to kill a murder victim. The novel is based on the real life Lindbergh kidnapping / murder case in 1932. The 1974 film of the book has an impressive cast, including Sir John Gielgud, Albert Finney, Vanessa Redgrave, Sean Connery, Lauren Bacall, Anthony Perkins, Michael York and Ingrid Bergman, among others. Other films and television adaptations have also been made of the book and Christie also features the Orient Express in her short story ‘Have You Got Everything You Want?’

Louis Jordan – CHOO CHOO CH’BOOGIE – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A2pRVyBmOY&ab_channel=AnichkaBanichka

The Orient Express appears all over the place, for example:

In Bram Stoker’s original ‘Dracula’ the group sworn to destroy Count Dracula travels on the Orient Express, thus arriving in Varna before he does.
Graham Greene features the Orient Express in two of his novels: ‘Travels With My Aunt’ and ‘Stamboul Train’
Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury features the train in his short story, ‘On the Orient, North’.
A. den Doolaard novel ‘Orient-Express’ takes place in North Macedonia
The 1992 novel ‘The Orient Express’ by Gregor von Rezzori is about a man who rides the train in his youth and returns to ride the train again late in life.
‘Madness on the Orient Express’ is a horror anthology in which all the stories are somehow connected to the Orient Express.
The Orient Express also shows up in many television shows including Star Trek; The Next Generation (Emergence), Doctor Who (The Big Bang) and Minder (Murder on the Orient Express).

TWENTIETH CENTURY FILM POSTER
By Illustrator unknown. Distributed by Columbia Pictures. – Scan via Pinterest., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88095651

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY LIMITED

The Twentieth Century Limited was the name of an express passenger train running from New York to Chicago. It made the run quickly, using track pans (called water troughs in the UK) to take on water along the way. Passengers walked to the train on an elaborate red carpet and that’s where the phrase ‘red carpet treatment’ came from. The train’s Art Deco style has been described as “spectacularly understated”. It made its first run on June 17, 1902 and left New York for the last time on December 2, 1967 at which point it became a spirit.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST FILM POSTER
By Copyrighted by Loew’s, Incorporated. Incorporates artwork by Saul Bass – http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TFNtX5EkR4A/US8p1CnHPsI/AAAAAAAABlQ/Ny7EKIHgk_I/s1600/north_by_northwest.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25318656

The Twentieth Century Limited played an important part in the 1973 film ‘The Sting’ starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. It was also featured in one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most well-known films, ‘North by Northwest’ starring Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint. At the end as the characters played by Grant and Saint are becoming intimate, Hitchcock slyly puts a shot on the screen of the Twentieth Century Limited entering a tunnel. Another Alfred Hitchcock film was called ‘Strangers on a Train’ about a seemingly perfect murder plan concocted by two murderers who meet on a train. The Twentieth Century Limited was also the setting for a Broadway musical called ‘On the Twentieth Century’ starring Madeline Kahn. The musical won five Tony Awards and was based on a stage play which was also adapted as a film in 1934 called ‘Twentieth Century’ with Carole Lombard and John Barrymore.

THE LAST SPIKE

The photograph above is one of the most famous photographs in Canadian history books. Canada was officially born on July 1, 1867. However it is the second largest nation in the world (second only to Russia) and in the 1800’s Nova Scotia in the east and British Columbia in the west might as well have been on separate planets. That’s why when the Canadian Pacific Railway built a track from one end of the country to the other Canada was finally a de facto nation. The last spike was driven into the last railway tie by Donald Smith (Baron Strathcona), done with great ceremony on November 7, 1885, an event all Canadian schoolchildren are taught, with a Canadian Pacific Railway train, identity unknown, sitting nearby waiting to complete its journey across Canada. This process of unification, which had to overcome natural disasters and financial crises, was captured by Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Canadian Railroad Trilogy’ – here is Lightfoot performing a live version on the BBC in 1972 interspersed with a range of historic photos of the building of the CPR across Canada – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yatx6pf25RE&ab_channel=DavidGarmaise .

Many workers died building the CPR across Canada, as the song ends with “Many are the dead men, too silent to be real”. These are the other railway ghosts.

The Last Spike was the name of a lengthy narrative poem in blank verse by Canadian poet E.J. Pratt written in 1952 to memorialize the driving of the last spike. Widely admired Canadian historian, journalist, broadcaster, contrarian Pierre Berton wrote two books, ‘The National Dream’ and ‘The Last Spike’, about the building of the CPR and the books were made into an eight part television docudrama in 1974 on the CBC; the audience ratings were record setting. The ghost of Pierre Berton metaphorically hovers over us all with his ever present love of life even though he was an atheist and didn’t believe in ghosts. The Trans-Siberian Railway connected eastern and western Russia in a similar unifying fashion.

Creedence Clearwater Revival – The Midnight Special – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXY68bgEISA&ab_channel=CarlosPatteta

The Midnight Special was a train that ran between St. Louis and Chicago from 1920 to 1968.

Train travel lends itself well to reflection. Sherlock Holmes is widely associated with the fog and crime of London but some of his most insightful comments have been uttered as he reflects on life while travelling by train away from London, for example:

On the way to Winchester Holmes opines: “the lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.” (The Adventure of the Copper Beeches).

Shortly after passing Reading Holmes remarks: “Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.” (The Boscombe Valley Mystery)

On their way by train to Exeter Holmes and Watson are contemplating their latest case and Holmes comments: “we are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture and hypothesis. The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact – of absolute, undeniable fact – from the embellishments of theorists and reporters.” (Silver Blaze)

HOLMES AND WATSON ANALYSING A CASE WHILE TRAVELLING BY TRAIN, ILLUSTRATION BY SIDNEY PAGET, 1891
By George Newnes – Internet Archive identifier, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110615095

There is an excellent, nasty 1996 film called ‘Trainspotting’ about heroin, poverty and desperation in Edinburgh and London starring Ewan McGregor and Jonny Lee Miller, but it really has nothing to do with trainspotting so you’d best ignore this sentence.

One of the great rock venues in London is The Roundhouse, a former railway engine shed, a circular building that functioned as a sort of gigantic railway turntable, built in 1846. Ed Sheeran, The Rolling Stones, Adele, Oasis, George Michael, Lady Gaga and The Doors have all played there. Here is the energetic Australian jazz / funk band The Cat Empire doing their song ‘Brighter Than Gold’ live at The Roundhouse in 2018. Ollie McGill on keyboards is good here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCi2lMJVRBE&ab_channel=TheCatEmpire

Finally, here is an incredible list of 500 songs that feature trains, songs recorded by everyone from Muddy Waters to the Rolling Stones, Orchestra Baobab to Frank Sinatra – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_train_songs

and here are seven songs from that list:

James Brown – NIGHT TRAIN – watch the audience starting at the 1 minute 46 second mark – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF_rZrH4yBY&ab_channel=JamesBrown

Harry Nilsson – NOBODY CARES ABOUT THE RAILROADS ANYMORE – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0yn8cv-Wp8&ab_channel=billbilladaadaaa

Paul Butterfield, Toots Thielemans and Larry Adler were great harmonica players, but here is the great Jack Bruce with Cream live in Sweden 1967 – TRAINTIME – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc9TgOKudU0&ab_channel=Rockin%27BluesTakis

Skeewiff – GOSPEL TRAIN – a most unusual video using ancient animated footage – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_imbuLky49s&ab_channel=TyeFelix

TAKE THE A TRAIN – a performance of the Duke Ellington classic from 2010 by Montreal singer Nikki Yanofsky – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K90xXn35d7o&ab_channel=janetreno

Dorothy Dandridge and The Nicholas Brothers – CHATTANOOGA CHOO CHOO – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTwy8ruyY40&ab_channel=JVrd

Jethro Tull – LOCOMOTIVE BREATH – this starts slowly but soon picks up steam – “I think God, He stole the handle / And the train it won’t stop going” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oS179o2lXw&ab_channel=DelaMusique

GHOST STORY 20 – The Pride of Iran

A KEENING WOMAN
By R. Prowse – Wicklow Heritage, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110428480

I will start by saying that I look forward to the day when a post like this is unnecessary and in fact insulting. It’s getting better but we’re not there yet. Have you heard of Albert Einstein? Einstein would have got nowhere until Emmy Noether bailed him out mathematically when his Theory of Relativity wasn’t working. Have you heard of Emmy Noether? The International Council for Science has declared May 12^th as International Women in Mathematics Day. May 12^th is the birthday of Maryam Mirzakhani.

MARYARM MIRZAKHANI (1977 – 2017)

The Fields Medal is the highest accolade available to a mathematician since there are no Nobel Prizes for Mathematics. The Fields Medal has been awarded since 1936, always to male recipients, 55 of them, until 2014 that is, when, finally, a woman was the recipient. That woman was Maryam Mirzakhani. She was also the first Fields medalist from Iran. But then, she died three years later, at the age of forty, of cancer.

Mirzakhani was awarded the prize “for her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces”. No, I don’t understand such things, however I do know that her work had a major impact on our understanding of M-Theory which, according to Stephen Hawking, is the best way to understand the Big Bang. While still in her teens she became the first Iranian woman to win the gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Hong Kong with a score of 41 out of 42. The following year she won the gold medal again, this time with a perfect score, and became the first person, man or woman, of any nationality to achieve a perfect score. Mirzakhani also had an Erdős number of 3 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_number ). Mirzakhani worked with surfaces, spaces and graphs, and loved to work out her equations using doodles, so much so, that her young daughter thought she was an artist.

When Mirzakhani won the Fields Medal, Hassan Rouhani, the president of Iran, sent his personal congratulations to her. When she died, Rouhani did something unprecedented with enormous religious implications. He approved of the announcement of Mirzakhani’s death in publications across the country to be accompanied by pictures of her without head covering of any kind, breaking a taboo going back centuries. Rouhani also made a statement of condolence that included this: “the unprecedented brilliance of this creative scientist and modest human being who made Iran’s name resonate in the world’s scientific forums, was a turning point in showing the great will of Iranian women.”

On the other hand – Mirzakhani was working in the United States when she died. The president of the United States, Donald Trump, had issued an executive order restricting travel to the US from Moslem countries, and so Mirzakhani’s parents were initially barred from travelling to America to attend their daughter’s funeral. USA! USA!

KAREN UHLENBECK 1982
By George Bergman – https://opc.mfo.de/detail?photo_id=6141, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77446302

More comprehensive background on important female mathematicians can be found on my previous posts here (I call these people The Handful) –

HYPATIA – THE DEPRAVITIES OF ANTIQUITY – https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2021/01/13/the-depravities-of-antiquity-hypatia/

EMMY NOETHER – MATHEMATICAL TERPSICHORE – https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2021/01/06/mathematical-terpsichore-emmy-noether/

KAREN UHLENBECK – EINE KLEINE MATHEMUSIK https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2020/12/23/eine-kleine-mathemusik-karen-uhlenbeck/

MARY CARTWRIGHT – ITERATED FUNCTIONARY https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2020/12/30/iterated-functionary-mary-cartwright/

SOFIA KOVALEVSKAYA – DO WHAT YOU MUST – https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2020/11/05/do-what-you-must-sofia-kovalevskaya/

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE – THE LADY WITH THE STATISTICS – https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2020/12/18/the-lady-with-the-statistics-florence-nightingale/

MARIA AGNESI – THE FINITE AND THE INFINITE https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2020/12/16/the-finite-and-the-infinite-maria-agnesi/

SOPHIE GERMAIN – THE NON-EXISTENT MONSIEUR WHITE – https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2020/12/09/the-non-existent-monsieur-white-sophie-germain/

HELENA RASIOWA – CLANDESTINE OPERATIONS https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2020/12/02/clandestine-operations-helena-rasiowa/

GRACE HOPPER – CODE WARRIOR – https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2020/11/25/code-warrior-grace-hopper/

NINA BARI – MOSCOW SUICIDE – https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2020/11/18/moscow-suicide-nina-bari/

ADA KING – THE ANALYTICAL MATHEMATICIAN https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2020/11/12/the-analytical-mathematician-ada-king/

Here are how these women are covered in various mathematical histories:

A Short Account of the History of Mathematics by W.W. Rouse Bell (1893) – 247 males mentioned, 2 of The Handful mentioned
Men of Mathematics by Eric Temple Bell (1937) – 29 males mentioned, 3 of The Handful mentioned
Mathematics and the Imagination by Edward Kasner and James Newman – 215 males mentioned, none of The Handful mentioned
The Great Mathematicians by Herbert Westren Turnbull (1951) – 68 males mentioned, none of The Handful mentioned
The World of Mathematics (4 volumes) edited by James R. Newman (1956) – 1153 males mentioned, 7 of The Handful mentioned
The Life Science Library: Mathematics by David Bergamini (1963) – 147 males mentioned, one of The Handful mentioned
The Mathematical Experience (1980) by Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh – 298 males mentioned, none of The Handful mentioned
The Book of Numbers (2008) by Peter J. Bentley – 120 males mentioned, none of The Handful mentioned
The Math Book (2009) by Clifford Pickover – 281 males mentioned, 5 of The Handful mentioned

TOTALS: 2665 males mentioned, 22 references to The Handful

But there is progress. In 2020 The MacTutor Web Site, which contains 3000 mathematical biographies, includes detailed biographies of all sixteen of the Handful.

These women have achieved great things themselves in the field of Mathematics but there have been other overlooked women who have played a very different but important role in the history of Mathematics.

GRIGORI PERELMAN 1993
By George Bergman – https://opc.mfo.de/detail?photo_id=6141, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77446302

GRIGORI PERELMAN (born 1966)

Perelman showed an aptitude for Mathematics at a very early age, in 1982 having achieved a perfect score at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Having proved the Soul Conjecture in Riemannian Geometry in 1994 he was offered lucrative positions in the United States but he remained in Russia. The Poincaré Conjecture, proposed by Henri Poincaré in 1904, was seen as the most important, and unsolved, problem in 20^th century topology. In 2003 Perelman published a paper which developed new techniques in the analysis of Ricci Flow and went on to prove the formidably difficult Poincaré Conjecture.

For his work he was awarded the highest honour in Mathematics, the Fields Medal but, incredibly, he declined, the only one to have ever done so, saying his work had been verified and that was enough for him. He was also awarded the Millennium Prize worth one million dollars which he also declined. He is a highly-principled fellow but he would not have got very far without his mother, Lyubov, who Grigori still lives with in St. Petersburg. She was a graduate student in Mathematics who gave up her own aspirations to be a mathematician and dropped out to raise Grigori. Grigori’s highly-principled stances regarding the Fields medal and the million dollar prize may also have had something to do with the way in which he was raised.

HENRI POINCARE (1854 – 2912)

Poincaré has been described historically as the last person brilliant enough to excel in all areas of the Mathematics of his day. He made fundamental contributions to both applied and pure Mathematics, Mathematical Physics and Celestial Mechanics. His work laid the foundations for what we now call Chaos Theory, and he was one of the founders of Topology. He created a new branch of Mathematics (Qualitative Theory of Differential Equations) and he extended the work of Maxwell making Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity possible. Poincaré even intervened in the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, attacking the spurious scientific claims concerning the evidence brought against Dreyfus by his antisemitic critics.

His remarkable achievements might easily have been dead in the water when he became seriously ill with diphtheria as a child. However while he recuperated he received instruction from his mother, Eugénie Launois (1830 – 1897)

MILEVA MARIC AND ALBERT EINSTEIN 1912
By Unknown author – http://ba.e-pics.ethz.ch/latelogin.jspx?records=:33805&r=1448594392396#1448594400592_1, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5507854

MILEVA MARIC (1875 – 1948)

Maric, born into a wealthy family in Austria-Hungary, was enrolled in the all-male Royal Classical High School in Zagreb. She attended Zurich Polytechnic starting in 1896 where she met another student named Albert Einstein. She took several courses in advanced Mathematics and her grade in Physics was the same as Einstein’s. She later married Einstein and they had three children together. There is a debate as to whether Maric collaborated with Einstein on some of his important early work, with credible support for both sides of the debate. What is not debatable is that she and Einstein sometimes talked about advanced topics in Physics and Mathematics. It is also true that Maric abandoned any thoughts of a career in Mathematics when she dropped out to raise their three children.

LEONHARD EULER (1707 – 1783)

A complete list of Euler’s accomplishments would require many screens so I won’t even try. He founded graph theory (thus making modern computers possible) and topology, and made important contributions to analytic number theory, complex analysis and infinitesimal calculus. He contributed to mechanics, fluid dynamics, optics, astronomy and music theory. He is also the most prolific mathematician in history with 866 publications. He was also sane and cheerful all his life (unusual for mathematicians), even after going blind.

Women were important in Euler’s life. He was raised by his maternal grandmother from the age of eight. In 1727 Euler took a position at the St. Petersburg Academy whose benefactress was Catherine I of Russia. After a power struggle Anna of Russia took over and Euler rose higher in the academic ranks while she was in charge. Euler later moved to Berlin and became the tutor of Friederike Charlotte of Brandenburg-Schwedt (Frederick the Great’s niece) who he exchanged hundreds of letters with, and thus honed his skills at explaining complex mathematical ideas to mathematical novices).

SIR ANDREW WILES KBE FRS 2005
By Required text: “copyright C. J. Mozzochi, Princeton N.J”, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2635913

SIR ANDREW WILES (born 1953)

It was British mathematician Andrew Wiles who solved Fermat’s Last Theorem, a famous problem in number theory first proposed in 1637, a famous proof that had eluded the best mathematical minds of the previous 350 years. In order to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, he proved a corollary of a limited form of the unproven Taniyama-Shimura-Weil conjecture which everyone in the field of mathematics was sure could itself not be proven. But Wiles proved it, and the rest is history.

Since Fermat’s Last Theorem was so famous, and so difficult, Wiles worked on it in secret on his own time for almost seven years before going public. His achievement resulted in dozens of honours and awards. Throughout all of it his wife Nada offered her unwavering support and enthusiasm. When he was working secretly at all hours she was the one managing the household and raising their children. When Wiles first announced he’d proven the theorem it turns out that there was a flaw and for about a year he wondered whether all his efforts had been for nothing. It was Nada who kept his optimism alive, so much so that though it took a year he fixed the flaw as a birthday present to her. Simon Singh wrote a definitive 315 page book on Wiles and Fermat’s Last Theorem and it contains only four very brief passing references to Nada.

CARL FRIEDRICH GAUSS (1777 – 1855)

Gauss is considered to be one of the three greatest mathematicians who ever lived (with Euler and Newton). He made important contributions in many areas of Mathematics and Science, and wrote his magnum opus, Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, when he was 21. He proved the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, and developed the theories of binary and ternary quadratic forms. He also came up with the Gaussian gravitational constant and the method of least squares.

In his personal life he was extremely close to his first wife, Johanna, and when she died in 1809 Gauss went into a depression that he never completely recovered from. He then married Minna Waldeck, who raised Gauss’ three children with Johanna plus three more children of her own, but she died in 1831 at which point her daughter Therese took over and cared for Gauss for the rest of his life. How many of Gauss’ accomplishments would have been possible without the practical and emotional support of Johanna, Minna and Therese?

KURT GODEL CIRCA 1926
By Required text: “copyright C. J. Mozzochi, Princeton N.J”, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2635913

KURT GODEL (1906 – 1978)

Historians consider Godel to be one of the three greatest logicians in history (with Aristotle and Frege). His 1931 Incompleteness Theorems turned Mathematics upside down by proving that in the arithmetic of natural numbers there are true propositions which can be neither proved nor disproved from the axioms, i.e. the system cannot prove its own consistency.

When Godel joined the faculty of the Institute For Advanced Study he kept to himself and was head and shoulders above the others on staff, with one exception. Only one other member of the faculty was his intellectual equal and the two of them used to take long walks together. That other faculty member was Albert Einstein. Imagine what they must have talked about. Einstein sponsored Godel when he became an American citizen.

In 1938 Godel married a dancer six years older than him named Adele Nimbursky. As the years went by Godel became more and more paranoiac and the only person he trusted was Adele. He developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned and would only eat food prepared by her. In 1977 Adele was hospitalized and without her Godel refused to eat. He died of severe malnutrition weighing only 29 kilograms at death. He owed his life to Adele.

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HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN IN MATHEMATICS DAY !

GHOST STORY 19 – Not Long to Live

THE BUNWORTH BANSHEE
By W.H. Brooke – https://archive.org/details/fairylegendstrad00crokrich, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5700663

“I intend to live forever, or die trying.” – Groucho Marx

Most philosophical historians agree that Plato’s best work is ‘The Laws’ (not ‘The Republic’) which was written when Plato was seventy-four . Some consider Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ as one of his greatest if not his greatest composition. He was fifty-six when he wrote it. Many geniuses do their best work after the age of fifty relying on years of experience and training to come up with something brilliant. That’s why it is so tragic when a great individual dies young. Some pretty famous people have died before their time – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Terry Fox, Joan of Arc and others. Here are profiles of five mathematicians who died at relatively young ages.

DUEL AT DAWN – EVARISTE GALOIS (1811 – 1832)

Galois was a brilliant French mathematician who established the foundations of Galois Theory and Group Theory (two major branches of Abstract Algebra), two of the most advanced and difficult areas of Mathematics and yet he was only twenty when he died. In a duel. Galois was still in his teens when he was able to determine the necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, solving a problem which had evaded the skills of mathematicians for over 350 years. Galois was also an out-spoken political radical heavily involved in the French Revolution of 1830 for which he was arrested repeatedly and eventually jailed.

EVARISTE GALOIS AGED 15
By Ariamihr – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63874368

Though a promising student at the École Normale he was expelled for his political views so he joined the National Guard but then his unit was disbanded when it threatened to overturn the government and nineteen officers were arrested. Soon after, on Bastille Day, Galois was again arrested for leading an anti-government protest while armed with several pistols, a loaded rifle and a dagger. He was released in April 1832 and a month later he was dead.

On May 30 he fought a duel with Ernest Duchatelet to protect the honour of a woman he had been in a relationship with named Stéphanie-Félicie Poterin du Motel. The night before the duel he rapidly scribbled down many of his evolving mathematical ideas in letters to friends, ideas which were so important later. Early in the morning of the 30^th the duel took place and Galois was shot in the abdomen, left for dead, found by a passing farmer who got help for him, but he died the next day of his wounds after refusing the offices of a priest. His funeral ended in riots and he was buried in a common grave whose exact location remains unknown. His total life’s output barely covered sixty pages but its content has had far-reaching consequences for almost every branch of Mathematics.

BUST OF NIELS HENRIK ABEL AT GJERSTAD
By Torgrim111 – ©Torgrim Landsverk, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15173040

ADULT CHILD OF ALCOHOLICS – NIELS ABEL (1802 – 1829)

Abel was a Norwegian mathematician whose most important work was the first complete proof that there is no general quintic equation in radicals, a proof that mathematicians had been seeking for about 250 years, a search involving intrigue and controversy (but that’s a story for another post). There are general formulae which generate the roots of equations of order one, two, three and four, but Abel showed that no such formula existed for order five equations. Abel also did important pioneering work concerning elliptic functions, he discovered Abelian functions, and he did all this while living in abject poverty and suffering from tuberculosis, which killed him at the age of twenty-six.

Both of his parents suffered from alcoholism. His father, a pastor, with degrees in philosophy and theology, got himself into trouble politically, destroying his career, and he responded by drinking heavily and dying two years later at the age of forty-eight. Abel received an education with the financial help of friends and mentors who recognized his phenomenal abilities. Later he managed to work with leading mathematicians in several academic centres in Europe doing research on elliptic, hyperelliptic and Abelian functions. His European tour in practical terms, however, was a failure, and he ended up back in Norway where he had to take out a loan to survive.

While in Paris Abel contracted tuberculosis. At Christmas 1828, while returning to Norway, he became ill. After a temporary relapse he died on April 6, 1829. Two days after his death he received a letter telling him that he had been offered a lucrative position as a professor of Mathematics at the prestigious University of Berlin.

ALAN TURING AGE 18 IN 1930
By Tomipelegrin – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=130316115

A DIFFERENT MAN – ALAN TURING (1912 – 1954)

Turing was a mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, theoretical biologist and considered by historians to be the Father of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. He came up with the idea of a Turing Machine – a mathematical computation model of an abstract machine that manipulates symbols using specified rules, capable of executing any computer algorithm.

Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park analysing the cyphers generated by the German Enigma machine. Turing and his team accomplished the nearly impossible task of cracking the Enigma code, information crucial to the victory of the Allies against Germany in World War Two, thereby saving thousands of lives. After the war he did important pioneering cybernetic work, designing the Automatic Computing Engine, one of the first modern electronic computers. Then he became interested in mathematical biology, doing important work in the field of morphogenesis and accurately predicting oscillating chemical reactions not observed until the 1960’s.

THE ENIGMA MACHINE
By Alessandro Nassiri – Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia "Leonardo da Vinci", CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47910919

In 1952 Turing was charged with gross indecency when he admitted to being homosexual, which was against the law at the time. He was given the choice of either imprisonment or probation along with injections of diethylstilbestrol which rendered him impotent and caused breast tissue to form. As he said, “no doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I’ve not found out.” He was not allowed to work in the US due to his conviction but he was free to work in other European countries.

Many of Turing’s accomplishments were unknown at the time due to their top secret nature whose disclosure was prohibited by the Official Secrets Act, and he is far more famous now than when he was alive. On June 8, 1954, he was found dead and an inquest determined that he had committed suicide by cyanide poisoning. He was forty-one.

BERNHARD RIEMANN 1863
By http://www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/hst/scientific-identity/explore.htm according to the German Wikipedia., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27383

RESTING IN GOD – BERNHARD RIEMANN (1826 – 1866)

Riemann is most famous for his formulation of the Riemann integral and his work on the Fourier Series, and his introduction of Riemann surfaces breaking new ground in the area of complex analysis. The Riemann Hypothesis, a foundational concept in analytic number theory, has to this day not been confirmed mathematically though it is almost certainly correct. Einstein’s famous Theory of General Relativity would not have been possible without Riemann’s pioneering work on differential geometry.

Riemann’s father was a poor pastor in the Kingdom of Hanover, Germany and his mother died when he was a child. He was very introverted and frightened of speaking in public, and suffered several nervous breakdowns while still a child. Despite his amazing mathematical skill he initially trained to be a pastor to help his family financially. At university, however, he switched to Mathematics at the recommendation of Gauss (considered to be one of the three greatest mathematicians who ever lived). He eventually became the Chair of the Mathematics Department at the University of Gottingen.

When the armies of Prussia and Hanover clashed in Gottingen in 1866 he fled to Italy with his family but while there he contracted tuberculosis and died at the age of thirty-nine. Riemann was devoutly religious throughout his life and he was reciting the Lord’s Prayer with his wife when he died. On his tombstone is written “Here rests in God Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann”.

SRINIVASA RAMANUJAN
By Konrad Jacobs – https://opc.mfo.de/detail?photoID=2328, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=111802441

AUTO-DIDACT – SRINIVASA RAMANUJAN (1887 – 1920)

Here we have a self-taught Indian mathematical genius who made significant contributions to Continued Fractions, Infinite Series, Mathematical Analysis and Number Theory. He came from a poor family, and without formal training so when he came up with his proofs they had a non-traditional structure. In 1904 Ramanujan sent a letter to G.H. Hardy, a prominent mathematician at Cambridge, with about 100 theorems with proofs that were so advanced and original that Hardy recognized he was dealing with a genius so he invited Ramanujan to England.

However, after doing important work with Hardy at Cambridge, some years later Ramanujan came down with tuberculosis. Earlier he had suffered from various bouts of serious ill health throughout his life. His family and physicians advised rest but Ramanujan continued to work on his studies, eventually returning to India in 1919. In 1920 he died at the age of thirty-two. Before he died he wrote down about 600 theorems on loose slips of paper which remained lost until 1976. At that point professional mathematical experts have said that they could not understand how Ramanujan could have come up with those proofs when he had not been taught the supporting information needed to understand them.

At one point Hardy visited Ramanujan in hospital and commented that the number of the cab he had taken to the hospital was 1729, such an uninteresting number. On the contrary, Ramanujan replied, 1729 is the smallest number which can be expressed as the sum of two different cubes in two different ways.

A future post on female math ghosts will be posted here on May 12, which is International Women in Mathematics Day as declared by the International Council for Science. May 12 is the birthday of a mathematical genius by the name of Maryam Mirzakhani.

BOADICEA
By John Opie – Easy Art. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6029871

A FEW MORE WHO BECAME PHANTOMS BEFORE REACHING FIFTY (ages in brackets):

MATHEMATICIANS:

Frank Ramsey (26), Gotthold Eisenstein (29), Ada Noel-King (36), Blaise Pascal (39), Sofia Kovalevskaya (41), Hypatia (45)

POLITICAL LEADERS / ACTIVISTS / POLITICIANS:

Iqbal Masih (13), Joan of Arc (19), Sophie Scholl (21), Steven Biko (30), Boadicea (31), Alexander the Great (32), Eva Peron (33), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (39), Che Guevera (39), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (39), Malcolm X (39), John F. Kennedy (46), Simon Bolivar (47), Ahmad Shah Massoud (48), Norman Bethune (49), Pierre Laporte (49)

SCIENTISTS:

Nicolas Carnot (36), Heinrich Hertz (36), Rosalind Franklin (37), Walter Sutton (39), James Clerk Maxwell (48)

ACTORS:

River Phoenix (23), James Dean (24), Heath Ledger (28)

LITERARY FIGURES:

Thomas Chatterton (17), John Keats (25), Wilfred Owen (25), Rupert Brooke (27), Percy Bysshe Shelley (29), Stephen Crane (29), Anne Brontë (29), Emily Brontë (30), Sylvia Plath (30), Emily Dickinson (35), Lord Byron (36), Arthur Rimbaud (37), Jane Austen (41)

ATHLETES:

Terry Fox (22), Bill Barilko (24), Steve Prefontaine (24), Sarah Burke (29), Roberto Clemente (38), Kobe Bryant (41)

MUSICIANS:

Ritchie Valens (17)
Eddie Cochran (21), Ailiyah (22), Buddy Holly (22), Selena (23), Johnny Ace (25), Charlie Christian (25), Curt Cobain (27), Pete Ham (27), Jimi Hendrix (27), Robert Johnson (27), Brian Jones (27), Jonhyung (27), Janis Joplin (27), James Morrison (27), Amy Winehouse (27), Mia Zapata (27), Bix Beiderbecke (28), Tim Buckley (28), Viktor Tsoi (28), Marc Bolan (29)
Jeff Buckley (30), Patsy Cline (30), Sandy Denny (31), Franz Schubert (31), John Bonham (32), Karen Carpenter (32), Mama Cass Elliot (32), Keith Moon (32), Eva Cassidy (33), Charlie Parker (34), Chick Webb (34), Sonny Boy Williamson (34), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (35), Phil Ochs (35), Stevie Ray Vaughan (35),Georges Bizet (36), Graham Bond (36), Bob Marley (36), Marilyn Monroe (36), Gene Vincent (36), Bobby Darin (37), Michael Hutchence (37), George Gershwin (38), Felix Mendelssohn (38), Frederic Chopin (39), Dinah Washington (39)
John Coltrane (40), John Lennon (40), Glenn Miller (40), Otis Spann (40), Jeff Healey (41), Kirsty MacColl (41), Richard Manuel (42), Jacqueline Du Pré (42), Elvis Presley (42), Peter Tosh (42), James Booker (43), Django Reinhardt (43), Marvin Gaye (44), Steve Marriott (44), Nat ‘King’ Cole (45), Slim Harpo (45), Elmore james (45), Freddie Mercury (45), Ricky Nelson (45), Dolores O’Riordan (46), Robert Schumann (46), Judy Garland (47), Edith Piaf (47), Whitney Houston (48), Scott Joplin (48), Nico (49), Mary Wells (49)

ENVIRONMENTALISTS:

Dr. Katharine Giles (35), Berta Caceres (44)

PREVIOUS GHOST STORIES

1. Houdini’s Secret Army and The Decline of Democracy https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2022/11/19/ghost-story-1-houdinis-secret-army-and-the-decline-of-democracy/

2. Sophie Scholl, Stephen Biko, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero

GHOST STORY 2 – The Power of the Spirit

3. Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Richard Burton, Niels Bohr, Frank Ramsey https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2022/12/02/ghost-story-3-a-slaughterhouse-a-melancholy-dane-an-impossible-cat-and-a-cambridge-apostle/

4. Jon Lord, James Booker, Dave Brubeck, Leon Russell, Oscar Peterson, Gary Brooker, Oscar Levant, Teddy Wilson, Jess Stacy and Glenn Gould

GHOST STORY 4 – Tickling the Ivories 1

5. Cleo Brown, Hazel Scott, Nina Simone, Alice Herz-Sommer, Myra Hess, Lil Hardin, Maria Mozart, Hiromi Uehara and Yuja Wang

GHOST STORY 5 – Tickling the Ivories 2

6. Ginger Baker, B.J.Wilson, Chick Webb, Levon Helm, Gene Krupa, Charlie Watts, Keith Moon, Baby Dodds, Joe Morello, John Bonham and Tony Allen (Yuriko Seki, Matt Chamberlain, Ringo Starr)

GHOST STORY 6 – Marching to Different Drums

7. Quantum realities, electromagnetism, genetic insights and the transfinite (Werner Heisenberg, James Clerk Maxwell, Gregor Mendel and Georg Cantor)

GHOST STORY 7 – Quantum Realities, Electromagnetism, Genetic Insights and The Transfinite

8. David Bowie, John Coltrane, Fela Kuti, Charlie Parker, Frankie Trumbauer, Sam Butera, Don Redman, Leroi Moore, Paul Desmond and Dick Parry)

GHOST STORY 8 – Hats Off to Antoine-Joseph Sax

9. More Complicated Than It Looks – Atheism

GHOST STORY 9 – More Complicated Than It Looks

10. Immortal Music / Extraordinary Mortals (Richard Rodgers, Georges Bizet, Larry Adler, Marlene Dietrich)

GHOST STORY 10 – Immortal Music / Extraordinary Mortals

11. Political Metaphysics

GHOST STORY 11 – Political Metaphysics

12. By Which We Measure Our Pain

GHOST STORY 12 – God is a concept by which we measure our pain

13. Berta Caceres, Rachel Carson, Enriqueta Medellin, Wangari Maathai, Penny Whetton, Katharine Giles, Idelisa Bonnelly

GHOST STORY 13 – They Are Afraid of Us Because We Are Not Afraid of Them

14. Use all your well-learned politesse

GHOST STORY 14 – Use All Your Well-Learned Politesse

15. Danger, Will Robinson

GHOST STORY 15 – Danger, Will Robinson

16. Eddie Cochran, Jeff Healey, Charlie Christian, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Django Reinhardt https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2023/04/14/ghost-story-16-theyll-find-my-corpse-draped-over-a-rail/

17. Peggy Jones, Norma-Jean Wofford, Luise Walker, Care Failure, Memphis Minnie, Rosetta Tharpe, Maria Luisa Anido, Kim Shattuck, Ida Presti, Loretta Lynn https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2023/04/21/ghost-story-17-cryin-wont-help-you-prayin-wont-do-you-no-good/

18. Where Things Are Hollow https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2023/04/28/ghost-story-18-where-things-are-hollow/