Whodunit Wednesday - From detectives to forensics to physics

Shirley and I like detective series and enjoy Sherlock Holmes (and its newer versions), Wallander (from Sweden) and of course most Agatha Christie detectives. Anyone who has read about Hercule Poirot will know that, no, he is not a Frenchman, even though he speaks French. He is a Belgian and served in the Belgian police before moving to England because of the war and setting up as the best detective in the world. 

Much of what we enjoy about detectives also has to do with forensics. It is amazing what can be done these days with technology. “Fingermarks” were first used to identify criminals around the time that Poirot was supposed to have lived and worked. But it was much later that Ingrid Daubechies came up with a mathematical model which is used in many ways today, including by the FBI in stocking fingerprints. She developed wavelets which are the basis of computers and processors and digital processes. As a 6 year-old Ingrid would go to sleep multiplying numbers by two from memory. She was the first woman to become a full professor of mathematics at Princeton University. But she was born and raised in Houthalen, Belgium, not far from where we live. 

And speaking of physics, Belgian priest and scientist George Lemaître was the first to present the idea of the Big Bang theory of physics in 1927. At the time, most scientists were working with an idea of an eternal universe - one that had always been the same and would always remain the same. This fit with the newer ideas of the evolution theory and offered the millions of years necessary to believe that all of this could happen by chance. Lemaître posited the Big Bang theory because of increasing evidence that there must be a beginning to creation.