In the Dark

Beard Liberation Front
PRESS RELEASE 30th April
Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

FINAL TRAINING FOR MAY DAY BEARD WAGGLE

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that training for the ancient May Day tradition of Beard Waggling has reached its final day around the UK.

The beard waggle involves shaking the beard vigorously from side to side and in doing so stimulating air currents that can cause objects to levitate slightly.

The tradition is believed to originate in late medieval times, and was designed to underline the new Spring growth of facial hair and with it the hope of change and renewal represented by May Day itself

The BLF traditionally asks its supporters, on the traditional London May Day march from Clerkenwell Green, to waggle their beards individually or collectively as the mood takes them to celebrate the arrival of Spring and to strike a…

Photo of George Boole by Samuel Prout Newcombe
Source: Wikimedia Commons

In 1847, the self-taught English Mathematician George Boole (1815–1864), whose two hundredth birthday we celebrated last year, published a very small book, little more than a pamphlet, entitled Mathematical Analysis of Logic. This was the first modern book on symbolic or mathematical logic and contained Boole’s first efforts towards an algebraic logic of classes.

Although very ingenious and only the second published non-standard algebra, Hamilton’s Quaternions was the first, Boole’s work attracted very little attention outside of his close circle of friends. His friend, Augustus De Morgan, would falsely claim that his own Formal Logic Boole’s work were published on the same day, they were actually published several days apart, but their almost simultaneous appearance does signal a growing interest in formal logic in the early nineteenth century. Boole went on to publish a much improved and expanded…