Category: Manuscripts & Archives

This year’s MELCOM (Middle East Libraries Committee) ‘UK’ meeting is being held in Dublin on 25 June. To celebrate this, an exhibition featuring some of the Manuscripts & Archives Research Library’s Middle-Eastern materials has been installed in the Long Room, accompanied by a virtual exhibition online.

Chief among the exhibits is a 19th-century copy of the ‘Shahnameh’ (alt. ‘Shahnama’) or the Book of Kings. Written by the 11th-century poet Firdausi, the Shahnameh, completed in eastern Iran in March 1010, is a work of mythology, history, literature and propaganda; a living poem that pervades and expresses many aspects of Persian culture. The Shahnameh contains approximately 50,000 verses and is generally divided into mythical, legendary and historical sections.

Another even older copy of the work forms part of the Preservation & Conservation: What’s That? exhibition also on display in the Long Room, along with some clay tablets from modern-day Iraq. The cuneiform script on these artefacts is the earliest-known form of script.

Included in the Book of Kings exhibition is an Iman’s wooden staff, of uncertain age, which is inscribed with verses from the Koran; an eighteenth century Arabic manuscript from Yemen, with a decorated leather satchel; and a copy of a thirteenth-century Syriac grammar from South-East Turkey, dating from 1578.

Take a look at M&ARL’s Asian, Middle Eastern and Ethiopic manuscripts website for more information about the Middle-Eastern collection.

Caoimhe Ní Ghormáin

The European Space Expo is an exciting, interactive exhibition visiting Trinity College Dublin this week. Of course, space exploration would be unthinkable without the contribution of the Trinity College graduate, mathematician, poet and professor of Astronomy William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865), perhaps best known as the inventor of Quaternions. Quaternions provide a mathematical notation for representing orientations and rotations of objects in three dimensions. They are crucial to flight dynamics and have been used in flight simulators and in the orbital mechanics of satellites.

His basic formula i² = j² = k² = ijk = -1 came in a ‘Eureka moment’ as he was walking along the Royal Canal at Cabra on 16 October, 1843. He named his new system ‘Quaternions’ because each number quadruple had four components, a totally new structure in mathematics. He described the discovery in a letter of 15 October 1858:

‘[I] felt the galvanic circuit of thought close; and the sparks which fell from it were the fundamental equations between i, j, k; exactly such as I have used them ever since. I pulled out on the spot a pocket-book, which still exists, and made an entry, on which, at the very moment, I felt that it might be worth my while to expend the labour of at least ten (or it might be fifteen) years to come’

This manuscript (TCD MS 1492/24.5) is probably the ‘pocket book’ referred to in this letter, and constitutes his earliest workings of Quaternions, save for some light vandalism during the excitement of the discovery. ‘[I couldn’t] resist the impulse – unphilosophical as it may have been – to cut with a knife on a stone of Brougham Bridge, as we passed it, the fundamental formula…’ The inscription is no longer there, but the site is now commemorated with a plaque and is the destination of the annual commemorative ‘Hamilton walk’.

Hamilton’s papers (TCD MS 1492 and 1493) are held in the Manuscripts & Archives Research Library. Prof. Rudraptna Ramnath, a consultant to NASA and Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology visited M&ARL last month to consult Hamilton’s notebooks and commented:

‘Quaternions, invented by Sir William Rowan Hamilton, have been used with great success in our work on spacecraft dynamics, in the Apollo and other space programs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and C.S. Draper Laboratory. The use of quaternions leads to great advantages in the study of rotational motion of spacecraft.

Personally, it was a great joy for me to be able to read Hamilton’s manuscripts on quaternions and physics. [The Old Library] is a wonderful place with great treasures. I am grateful to the Trinity College Dublin mathematics and library staff for their courtesy. I also had a lot of fun in finding the bridge on which Hamilton carved out the governing laws of quaternion multiplication.’

Hosted by the Trinity College Dublin School of Physics, the spectacular Space Expo dome will be in Front Square and open to the public from 4th – 9th June.  www.SpaceExpo.ie.  Twitter: @SpaceExpoDublin

Estelle Gittins

The scholar’s life is popularly thought to be one of ‘secure seclusion’, where travel is down the ‘peaceful walks of literature and learning’ (Felix Adler). But long before the provostship of Trinity College Dublin gave him access to the likes of Dmitri Shostakovich, Clement Atlee and John D. Rockefeller Jr, Albert Joseph McConnell (1903-1993) – like Woody Allen’s Zelig – had a habit of unobtrusively knocking up against some of the more notorious figures of the twentieth century.

McConnell was a precocious student at TCD, winning the gold medal for mathematics in 1926. Two years later, he went to fascist Italy to pursue doctoral study with the Jewish mathematician Tullio Levi-Civita, who had been an early influence on Albert Einstein. The McConnell Archive (TCD MS 10888) contains photographs from McConnell’s return trip to Rome in 1935. One shows Benito Mussolini walking the Streets with supporters; two others document his opening the academic year at Rome University.

Himself sometimes described as a dictator, Eamon de Valera was a close friend of McConnell’s, with whom he shared a common interest – de Valera was a graduate and teacher of mathematics. This friendship is credited with bringing TCD in from the social and economic cold in which it had languished after Independence; after becoming Provost in 1952, McConnell pushed for grants and state recognition previously denied the College. President de Valera would appoint McConnell to the Council of State in 1973, the first TCD officer so honoured.

De Valera established the Institute for Advanced Studies in 1940 to further research in physics and Celtic studies. One of McConnell’s fellow members was Nobel-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger, resident in Ireland on de Valera’s invitation from 1939-1956 (he became an Irish citizen in 1948). McConnell became a great friend of Schrödinger’s. When McConnell attended the 1950 International Congress of Mathematics in Cambridge, Massachussets, his first wife Hilda (herself a scholar who assisted Edmund Curtis on his Calendar of Ormond Deeds) stayed with Hildegunde March in Innsbruck. March was the wife of Schrödinger’s former assistant, the physicist Arthur March, and had Schrödinger’s child Ruth. Hilda’s funny ‘catty’, letters from Innsbruck describe the March household (‘the Herr Prof.’ and the ‘Hausfrau’), where the atmosphere was tense because ‘naughty’ ‘Erwin’ was also a guest.

Darragh O’Donoghue