(Roughly) Daily

Victorian taste-maker Thomas Gowing:

The Beard, combining beauty with utility, was intended to impart manly grace and free finish to the male face. To its picturesqueness, Poets and Painters, the most competent judges, have borne universal testimony. It is indeed impossible to view a series of bearded portraits, however indifferently executed, without feeling that they possess dignity, gravity, freedom, vigor, and completeness; while in looking on a row of razored faces, however illustrious the originals, or skillful the artists, a sense of artificial conventional bareness is experienced…

More from Gowing’s masterwork, The Philosophy of Beards, at “The argument we need for the universal wearing of beards.”

* Aulus Gellius

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As we let ’em grow, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Vladimir Andreevich Steklov; he was born on this date in 1864.  An important Russian mathematician and physicist, he made important contributions to set theory, hydrodynamics, and the theory of elasticity, and wrote widely on the history of science.  But he is probably best remembered as the honored namesake of the Russian Institute of Physics and Mathematics (for which he was the original petitioner); its math department is now known as the Steklov Institute of Mathematics.

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