Who Discover ZERO - The History Of Math
On a recent hike around the ruins of the St. Francis Dam disaster site about 40 miles from Downtown Los Angeles, with my archaeologist friend, John, we discussed the tarnished life of its builder and the age of the “Gentlemen Scientist.”The St. Francis Dam was built between 1924 and 1926 to create a large storage reservoir for the city of Los Angeles, California, by the Bureau of Water Works and Supply, now the Department of Water and Power. The department was under the direction of its general manager and chief engineer, William Mulholland. If you’ve ever seen the classic movie, “Chinatown”, William Mulholland was such a significant part of Los Angeles history they had to break him into two characters.
While he was a legend in his own time, Mulholland wasn’t a civil engineer by today’s standards. He was self-taught during his early days as a “ditch tender” for the Water Department. After a hard day’s work, Mulholland would study textbooks on mathematics, engineering, hydraulics, and geology. This origin story is the foundation of the “Gentlemen Scientist” persona – devouring all the material available on a subject and then claiming an understanding that would allow them to oversee a massive undertaking, despite any form of testing or certification.
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If I showed up at NASA and said I was qualified to send humans to Mars because I read a lot of books on space travel and used to build model rockets as a kid, they would throw me off the property. In Mulholland’s day, it meant a promotion to the head of the department.
Mulholland is an integral part of Los Angeles history. While many of his early efforts literally changed the landscape of Los Angeles (he supervised the design and construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which brought water to much of the county), his lack of modern civil engineering caused “one of the worst American civil engineering disasters of the 20th century,” according to the Catherine Mulholland, in her biography of William Mulholland, her grandfather.
Just minutes before midnight on March 12, 1928, the dam catastrophically failed, and the resulting flood killed at least 431 people, but some reports claim up to one thousand. Even with the smaller number, the collapse of the St. Francis Dam remains the second-greatest loss of life in California’s history. Only the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire killed more people.
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The discussion with my friend that day made me think about the search engine optimization business and its collection of “Gentleman Scientists.”
Instead of building dams, our colleagues are trying to reverse engineer the complex algorithms of search engines like Google using faulty statistical practices to devise SEO strategies backed by shoddy science.
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