Will the real Professor PlayFair please stand up?

Believe it or not (and I just know that you will find this very hard to believe), I am actually not the first or only Professor PlayFair. This did indeed come as a bit of a shock to me, but then once I read more about John PlayFair, I thought that I'd rather have enjoyed meeting him.

Professor John PlayFair was a professor mathematics and then natural history at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. This was quite a ways ago - the grand professor passed away in 1819 at the age of 69. During his lifetime he made two quite significant additions to scientific and mathematical thinking.

The first of these was a summary of the work of scientist James Hutton, entitled Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth. That's a lot of big words! What were they trying to say? That the same things shaping the earth and the universe now are the same things that have always shaped it. Another name for this idea is uniformitarianism. It sounds like the study of people in uniform, but in fact it's the longer name for this same idea. PlayFair's book was illustrating examples of uniformitarianism, and this was a key idea that shaped how we study the earth today. We'll talk more about this idea in tomorrow's post.

John PlayFair's second major contribution, and the one he is most famous for, is known as PlayFair's axiom (= a self evident truth that requires no proof). PlayFair's axiom states;

Exactly one line can be drawn through any point not on a given line parallel to the given line.

Say what? Is this so evident it doesn't require a proof? What the heck is a proof anyway?

I also promise we'll talk more about logical thinking, axioms, and how to have fun with logic. Meanwhile, I part with this suggestion. One of the forces that shapes the earth's surface is volcanism. Hard to believe that we stand on a thin crust floating over rocks so hot they are liquid, but we are. One toy that has been enjoyed for decades is the "make your own home volcano". They can erupt again and again, nobody gets burned, and it's also an introduction to basic chemistry.

You can make your own volcano out of paper mache, or our Mega Volcano kit contains everything you need to make your own repeated eruptions. It's an easy way to get started, and it's truly a "blast". (You'll hear me make that joke a lot... sorry...)

Until next time - don't let the uniformitarianists get you down! Be spontaneous!

Professor PlayFair