What motivated Tagore to compose the Indian National Anthem?

On India's national anthem.

Most national anthems try to sow FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) as the French anthem does, extoll glory of war and condemn traitors who kept people in chains (in the south) as US anthem does, or an appeal to God to save the sovereign as the British anthem does. Here is Exhibit A:

France:

"Do you hear, in the countryside,
The roar of those ferocious soldiers?
They're coming right into your arms
To cut the throats of your sons, your women!"

USA:

"O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;"

When the American Civil War started, in indignation the noted jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. added a stanza that included:

"Down, down with the traitor that dares to defile
The flag of her stars and the page of her story!
By the millions unchained who our birthright have gained,
We will keep her bright blazon forever unstained!
And the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph shall wave
While the land of the free is the home of the brave."

UK:

"God save our gracious Queen
Long live our noble Queen
God save The Queen!
Send her victorious
Happy and glorious
Long to reign over us
God save The Queen!"

The Indian anthem is definitely of the third kind, I suppose a vestige of British imperialism. However, more interesting question is what motivated Tagore to use the British model. Apparently it was not the British anthem, but the anthem of one of the Indian sates, in fact the state from which I come: Mysore. It should not be surprising. The objective of this post is to describe how Tagore was motivated by the Mysore anthem to compose the Indian national anthem.

About Mysore

Mysore is a state that has been peaceful through most of its history. It has neither fought to gain territory nor has it fought to keep others out of its territory. In all it has fought four wars in all. ALL of them against the British which desperately tried to colonise it. All four were fought during the rather unsavoury period in its history when it was ruled by Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan. While they were trying to protect their realm against the British intruders, their reign was quite unlike the rest of Mysore history in that they tried to colonise parts of southern India that no other dynasty of Mysore did.

Ultimately, in 1799, in the fourth Anglo-Mysore war the British killed Tipu. The Nizam and the Marathas had connived with the British in this. Then the British had the Kingdom of Mysore on its hands, but probably did not know what to do with it. (Like Jinnah who fought like hell to get his Pakistan, and when he got it did not know what to do with it. Soon after he died.) But the Britannica had wider ambitions, and being a nation of shopkeepers and traders wanted to control but not bother with one more state to handle. So, after the Nizam and the Marathas had got their booty, the British gave what was left of the state to the King of Mysore, but kept a "resident" just to make sure they had a toehold in the kingdom. In 1831 the British got the opportunity to do their mischief. Claiming misrule, they deposed Maharaja Krishnaraja Wadiyar and brought the Kingdom directly under the rule of the East India Company. 

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed in Britain and the Privy Council there ordered the East India Company to reverse the annexation of Mysore. Under the rendition of 1881, the state of Mysore was given back to the Wodeyar dynasty. So, Mysore history has four periods: The Wodeyar period, the Islamic period, the British period, and finally basic to the Wodeyars.

On the Mysore Anthem and Tagore

The Mysore anthem (Kayo Sri Gowri) was commissioned by  Maharaja Chamaraja Wodeyar to commemorate the rendition of 1881. In 1919, the Vice Chancelloe of Mysore University, a Bristol born alumnus of Balliol College (Oxford) and son of Brahmo parents who were social reformers, Sir Albion Rajkumar Banerjee, invited Tagore to visit Mysore. It was then that Tagore heard the Kayo Sri Gowri for the first time. As the article cited below says, "Tagore was impressed. He had already heard of the anthem several years before and realised that the lyrics are based on Raga- Dheerashankarābharanam. This raga is known as Bilawal in the Hindustani  and the Western equivalent is the C major scale, Ionian mode." Then Tagore went on the compose the Indian National anthem "Jana gana Mana".

Reference:

http://samharshbangalore.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-anthem-that-inspired-jana-gana-mana.html

On Churchill and India, US & Indian independence, and the Second World War.

For the past few weeks there has been a debate raging about Churchill & India, the role of United States in Indian Independence, and the second world war. Here are excerpts from my posts.

POST: Churchill was a very talented and dynamic individual ,although definitely a flawed one.He was an imperialist but that cannot alone be allowed to overshadow his tremendous other qualities.I have no defence for his callous disregard of the great Bengal famine but he had very many other sterling qualities and achievements to his credit .
First and foremost he did the right thing when he defied Hitler in world war 2 and united the nation behind him.He saved European civilisation from a dark age due to his timely resistance.He spoke out against Hitler when everybody INCLUDING the Labour Party was for giving the Germans a chance to rehabilitate themselves after the Versailles treaty which gave most informed people a guilt complex.
The support of King Edward should be commended as a liberal support of the right to marry irrespective of rank.At that time the Nazis had nothing to do with it .
Churchill was a daring and shrewd military strategist .He should be credited for building up the Royal Navy prior to World War I with the Queen Elizabeth class battleships which beat back the German surge and which Navy was able to blockade Germany to desperation in that war.It was correctly said that the C in C of the Royal Navy Sir Jellicoe was one man who could lose the war in an afternoon .As far as Gallipoli was concerned the initial concept ,which was Churchill's , was brilliant and everybody at that time felt the British would take Istanbul easily.Then Kitchener and the British cabinet changed the concept of the operation,made it a prolonged land battle and as Churchill was identified with the proposal he had to pay a political price.
Another of Churchill's brilliant ideas resulted in the battle tank.
In world war 2,Churchill's management of the war resulted in much less casualties than in the First World War and I admire the way the various campaigns and chiefly DDay assault was conducted .Obviously Churchill was not the only architect of those victories but undoubtedly he had a major role.
By his crafty declaration of war against the Japanese immediately after Pearl Harbour he got Hitler to declare war against the USA and made it easier for FDR to enter the war in Europe.
I found in his books a very shrewd military analyst as well.As they are very engrossing ,makes for good reading as well.
Let us therefore not indulge in what many in India are doing presently ,label a person by one event or occurrence ,and ignore his other facets.

MY RESPONSE: You grotesquely overstate the virtues of churchill. 

First churchill did what any self-respecting Englishman, and in fact any human being would have done. To call it the right thing to do is superfluous. 

To say that churchill "saved European civilization" is obscene. Britain would to this day be a Nazi colony if it did not get the full support of United States. Do you realise that the supreme commander of Allied forces was NOT a Briton but an American? This in spite of conniving by Field Marshal Montgomery.

Yes, one can call churchill shrewd. Many would call him cunning, fully exploiting the fact that his mother was American in begging thwe Americans to save them. As an American taxpayer I would have liked my government to send churchill the bill.

POST: Dear Mr Ganguly will reply in more detail after reading the links you have given.

In the meanwhile please consider that Hitler had offered enticingly peace proposals through various neutral countries in May 1940 as soon as the France fall became certain which Churchill rejected but others were still considering and I am not sure but Lord Halifax was one of them.So by no means "any self-respecting Englishman" would obviously do the right thing in a situation which everybody was saying was hopeless.Self-respecting Englishmen had nevertheless appeased Hitler and promised peace for our time ; they had fought a phoney war from September 1939 to May 1940;why was not the right thing obvious then ?
If Britain had not defied Germany in 1940 it would have become a. Colony of the Nazis that year ; if Germany had not fought Russia and had chipped away at the British Empire at the edges and weakened it and if USA had not come into the war ,it is possible that by 1944 Britain may have been weakened enough to succumb.But these are hypothetical scenarios against the certain one that in 1940 Churchill saved Britain for which he is rightly honoured.
As for the begging bowl bit let us also not forget that it was in USA's interest geopolitically to retain free and potentially friendly economies in Europe and not for Nazi Germany to dominate solely .Roosevelt realised this -he just did not intervene altruistically.
In 1940 Roosevelt did not have the political capital and support to declare war on Germany and if Britain had gone under he could have done nothing about it even though it was not in his long term interest .

Please further note that I always said that Churchill was not alone in the direction of the war.Due to the preponderance of American aid he had no choice but to be second fiddle .But whatever reading I have done has led me to the conclusion that he contributed a lot to the planning and execution.It was always politically decided that the commander for operation Overlord would be an American.
When the Americans ignored Churchill's pleas and did not take more areas in Germany as they very well could have in 1945 before the Russians got there the free world was the loser till 1989.

MY RESPONSE: I find it amazing that an empire over which sun did not set had to go down on knees before FDR. Like a cat with a large brood that hisses when encountering a larger animal, Britain (along with France) DECLARED war on Germany in 1939, knowing fully well that its enslaved colonies had no choice but to kowtow, and the fully independent dominions would follow suit. This bit of bravado (or bluff) was called out by Germany by soon extending the war over the Atlantic trade (the life blood of the merchant nation Britain).

You have the facts wrong. Hitler's overtures were rejected by Chamberlain, not churchill. In fact, Chamberlain observed then, "Past experience has shown that no reliance can be placed upon the promises of the present German Government." (see Wikipedia). It was upon this rejection that Hitler ordered war on France. Then Germany occupied Norway. The discontent in May 1940 over Norway forced Chamberlain out and churchill was in. The importance of the loss of Norway probably also had to do with the fact that Norway was probably the only country that then had the capability of producing heavy water. German scientists headed by Werner Heisenberg were then probably ahead of every one else in the development of nuclear weapons. (If you are interested, there is a very good movie on this, "The Heavy Water War") Heavy water is required for nuclear weapons.

Up to 1940 Britain was not fighting Germans; they were just hissing and puffing their cheeks. The scenarios you describe as hypothetical were not lost on the shrewd churchill. I wouldn't be surprised if they were just the scenarios that drove Churchill to beg FDR for help. But then the Americans were just becoming familiar with the Indian independence movement, and had received Gandhi's famous letter toi FDR asking for help.

Gandhi's letter to FDR hand delivered by Louis Fischer unequivocally concluded:

“The full acceptance of my proposal and that alone can put the Allied cause on an unassailable basis. I venture to think that the Allied declaration that the Allies are fighting to make the world safe for freedom of the individual and for democracy sounds hollow so long as India and, for that matter, Africa are exploited by Great Britain and America has the Negro problem in her own home. But in order to avoid all complications, in my proposal I have confined myself only to India. If India becomes free;, the rest must follow, if it does not happen simultaneously. In order to make my proposal foolproof I have suggested that, if the Allies think it necessary, they may keep their troops, at their own expense in India, not for keeping internal order but for preventing Japanese aggression and defending China. So far as India is concerned, we must become free even as America and Great Britain are. The Allied troops will remain in India during the war under treaty with the free Indian Government that may be formed by the people of India without any outside interference, direct or indirect.”

He went on to say:

"I have profited greatly by the writings of Thoreau and Emerson. I say this to tell you how much I am connected with your country. Of Great Britain I need say nothing beyond mentioning that in spite of my intense dislike of British rule, I have numerous personal friends in England whom I love as dearly as my own people. I had my legal education there. I have therefore nothing but good wishes for your country and Great Britain. You will therefore accept my word that my present proposal, that the British should unreservedly and without reference to the wishes of the people of India immediately with- draw their rule, is prompted by the friendliest intention. I would like to turn into goodwill the ill will which, whatever may be said to the contrary, exists in India towards Great Britain and thus enable the millions of India to play their part in the present war. My personal position is clear. I hate all war. If, therefore, I could persuade my countrymen, they would make a most effective and decisive contribution in favour of an honourable peace. But I know that all of us have not a living faith in non-violence, Under foreign rule however we can make no effective contribution of any 'kind in this war, except as helots." You can see the whole letter at https://research.archives.gov/id/7065056

As to hissing and puffing,

"The 3rd Infantry Division was deployed to Belgium as part of the British Expeditionary Force. Realizing that the British and the French had little intention to invade Germany, Montgomery predicted a defeat should Germany decide to invade France, and trained his troops for tactical retreat, which paid off when the men of the 3rd Infantry Division effectively fell back toward the French coast. During Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of British and French troops to the United Kingdom, he assumed command of the II Corps as Alan Brooke, the previous commanding officer, became the acting commander of the British Expeditionary Force. Upon his return to the United Kingdom in Jun 1940, he openly criticized the British Expeditionary Force leadership for the defeat, and was briefly relegated to divisional command, but was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath." (http://ww2db.com/person_bio.php?person_id=7)

"In the next month [September 1942], Montgomery started to receive great quantities of supplies from the United States, including large numbers of tanks. In Oct 1942, Montgomery decided that he was ready to launch Operation Lightfoot. On 23 Oct, the two forces engaged at the Battle of El Alamein, and 12 days later Montgomery achieved his decisive victory, capturing 30,000 Axis prisoners."

Montgomery convinced Eisenhower about Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands which was an utter failure. In fact after that Eisenhower removed Montgomery from the front and made him in charge of British Occupation Forces. I suppose his experience in India prepared him for that position.

On writing

One the most productive researcher in Operations Research I have met in my life once told me that he writes a page or two every day. When I asked him what he writes about, he said that he wrote about anything that came to mind. That often it was just an idea that just came to mind. Many of those pages written did not go anywhere, but the few that he pursued were gems.

I have tried that, but I am not disciplined enough, and so most of the ideas that come to my mind never see the light of the day.

When I was in junior high, my teachers required me to write a page every day. When I was doing my doctorate at Pittsburgh I took two courses from one of the most profoundly scholarly mathematical sociologist I have ever known. He required us to write essays about 4-5 pages EVERY week. Even today, after forty years I have every bit of paper I wrote in those courses, and I look at them every now and then. I look at all the red ink on these notes to realise that I will never be able to repay my debt to that professor. And over the decades almost every paper I have written has been influenced profoundly by what I learnt in those courses. None of the dozens of courses I took in my student days comes close in their impact on me.

Operations Research I have met in my life once told me that he writes a page or two every day. When I asked him what he writes about, he said that he wrote about anything that came to mind. That often it was just an idea
 that just came to mind. Many of those pages written did not go anywhere, but the few that he pursued were gems.

I have tried that, but I am not disciplined enough, and so most of the ideas that come to my mind never see the light of the day.

When I was in junior high, my teachers required me to write a page every day. When I was doing my doctorate at Pittsburgh I took two courses from one of the most profoundly scholarly mathematical sociologists I have ever known. He required us to write essays about 4-5 pages EVERY week. Even today, after forty years I have every bit of paper I wrote in those courses, and I look at them every now and then. I look at all the red ink on these notes to realise that I will never be able to repay my debt to that professor. And over the decades almost every paper I have written has been influenced profoundly by what I learnt in those courses. None of the dozens of courses I took in my student days comes close in its impact on me.

PS: I would be remiss if I did not name the professor. It is Professor Tom Fararo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Fararo).

On Deidre McCloskey's address at the American Accounting Association Annual Meeting in 2012.

What a wonderful speaker Deidre McCloskey! Reminded me of JR Hicks who also was a stammerer. For an economist, I was amazed by her deep and remarkable understanding of statistics.
It was nice to hear about Gossett, perhaps the only human being who got along well with both Karl Pearson and R.A. Fisher, getting along with the latter itself a Herculean feat.
Gosset was helped in the mathematical derivation of small sample theory by Karl Pearson, he did not appreciate its importance, it was left to his nemesis R.A. Fisher. It is remarkable that he could work with these two giants who couldn't stand each other.
In later life Fisher and Gosset parted ways in that Fisher was a proponent of randomization of experiments while Gosset was a proponent of systematic planning of experiments and in fact proved decisively that balanced designs are more precise, powerful and efficient compared with Fisher's randomized experiments (see http://sites.roosevelt.edu/sziliak/files/2012/02/William-S-Gosset-and-Experimental-Statistics-Ziliak-JWE-2011.pdf ) 

I remember my father (who designed experiments in horticulture for a living) telling me the virtues of balanced designs at the same time my professors in school were extolling the virtues of randomisation. 

In Gosset we also find seeds of Bayesian thinking in his writings.  While I have always had a great regard for Fisher (visit to the tree he planted at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta was for me more of a pilgrimage), I think his influence on the development of statistics was less than ideal.

On Statistics and Philosophy

This is an exchange between Professor David Johnstone (University of Sydney) and I some time ago.

Jagdish Gangolly:
Your call for a dialogue between statistics and philosophy of science is very timely, and extremely important considering the importance that statistics, both in its probabilistic and non-probabilistic incarnations, has gained ever since the computational advances of the past three decades or so. Let me share a few of my conjectures regarding the cause of this schism between statistics and philosophy, and consider a few areas where they can share in mutual reflection. However, reflection in statistics, like in accounting of late and unlike in philosophy, has been on short order for quite a while. And it is always easier to pick the low hanging fruit. Albert Einstein once remarked, ""I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for the thinnest part and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy".
1.
Early statisticians were practitioners of the art, most serving as consultants of sorts. Gosset worked for Guiness, GEP Box did most of his early work for Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), Fisher worked at Rothamsted Experimental Station, Loeve was an actuary at University of Lyon... As practitioners, statisticians almost always had their feet in one of the domains in science: Fisher was a biologist, Gossett was a chemist, Box was a chemist, ... Their research was down to earth, and while statistics was always regarded the turf of mathematicians, their status within mathematics was the same as that of accountants in liberal arts colleges today, slightly above that of athletics. Of course, the individuals with stature were expected to be mathematicians in their own right.
All that changed with the work of Kolmogorov (1933, Moscow State, http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~bskyrms/bio/readings/kolmogorov_theory_of_probability_small.pdf), Loeve (1960, Berkeley), Doob(1953, Illinois), and Dynkin(1963, Moscow State and Cornell). They provided mathematical foundations for earlier work of practitioners, and especially Kolmogorov provided axiomatic foundations for probability theory. In the process, their work unified statistics into a coherent mass of knowledge. (Perhaps there is a lesson here for us accountants). A collateral effect was the schism in the field between the theoreticians and the practitioners (of which we accountants must be wary) that has continued to this date. We can see a parallel between accounting and statistics here too.
2.
Early controversies in statistics had to do with embedding statistical methods in decision theory (Fisher was against, Neyman and Pearson were for it), and whether the foundations for statistics had to be deductive or inductive (frequentists were for the former, Bayesians were for the latter). These debates were not just technical, and had underpinnings in philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics (after all, the early contributors to the field were mathematicians: Gauss, Fermat, Pascal, Laplace, deMoivre, ...). For example, when the Fisher-Neyman/Pearson debates had ranged, Neyman was invited by the philosopher Jakko Hintikka to write a paper for the journal Synthese ( "Frequentist probability and Frequentist statistics", 1977).
3.
Since the early statisticians were practitioners, their orientation was usually normative: in sample theory, regression, design of experiments,.... The mathematisation of statistics and later work of people like Tukey, raised the prominence of descriptive (especially axiomatic) in the field. However, the recent developments in datamining have swung the balance again in favour of the normative.
4. Foundational issues in statistics have always been philosophical. And treatment of probability has been profoundly philosophical (see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_interpretations).
____________________________________

David Johnstone:
In reply to your points: (1) the early development of statistics by Gossett and Fisher was as a means to an end, i.e. to design and interpret experiments that helped to resolve practical issues, like whether fertilizers were effective and different genetic strains of crops were superior. This left results testable in the real world laboratory, by the farmers, so the pressure to get it right rather than just publish was on. Gossett by the way was an old fashioned English scholar who spent as much time fishing and working in his workshop as doing mathematics. This practical bent comes out in his work.
(2) Neman’s effort to make statistics “deductive” was always his weak point, and he went to great lengths to evade this issue. I wrote a paper on Neyman’s interpretations of tests, as in trying to understand him I got frustrated by his inconsistency and evasiveness over his many papers. In more than one place, he wrote that to “accept” the null is to “act as if it is true”, and to reject it is to “act as if it is false”. This is ridiculous in scientific contexts, since to act as if something is decided 100% you would never draw another sample - your work would be done on that hypothesis.
(3) On the issue of normative versus descriptive, as in accounting research, Harold Jeffreys had a great line in his book, “he said that if we observe a child add 2 and 2 to get 5, we don’t change the laws of arithmetic”. He was very anti learning about the world by watching people rather than doing abstract theory. BTW I own his personal copy of his 3rd edition. A few years ago I went to buy this book on Bookfinder, and found it available in a secondhand bookshop in Cambridge. I rand them instantly when I saw that they said whose book it was, and they told me that Mrs Jeffreys had just died and Harold’s books had come in, and that the 1st edition was sold the day before.
(4) I adore your line that “Foundational issues in statistics have always been philosophical”. .... So must they be in accounting, in relation to how to construct income and net assets measures that are sound and meaningful. Note however that just because we accept something needs philosophical footing doesn’t mean that we will find or agree on that footing. I recently received a comment on a paper of mine from an accounting referee. The comment was basically that the effect of information on the cost of capital “could not be revealed by philosophy” (i.e. by probability theory etc.). Rather, this is an empirical issue. Apart from ignoring all the existing theory on this matter in accounting and finance, the comment is symptomatic of the way that “empirical findings” have been elevated to the top shelf, and theory, or worse, “thought pieces”, are not really science. There is so much wrong with this extreme but common view, including of course that every empirical finding stands on a model or a priori view. Indeed, remember that every null hypothesis that was ever rejected might have been rejected because the model (not the hypothesis) was wrong. People naively believe that a bad model or bad experimental design just reduces power (makes it harder to reject the null) but the mathematical fact is that it can go either way, and error in the model or sample design can make rejection of the null almost certain.

Alan Turing's contributions to Econometrics.

David Giles' blog on Econometrics is one of my most favourite blogs, and I read it all the time. And this blog on Turing is the most informative one from Giles.

 While I am quite familiar with Econometrics having overdosed on it in graduate school, and also am familiar with Turing's work in Computing, I didn't have the foggiest idea about Turing's contributions in Econometrics until I read this blog.

Proving the Central Limit Theorem, developing sequential analysis and LU decomposition for matrix inversion all developed before the age of 35! Turing was the Mozart of Computing, Statistics, and Mathematics.  Life was not kind to him.

It is tragic that I never heard of Turing when I was a Statistics/Mathematics  undergraduate back in the early sixties even though I did study CLT, sequential analysis as well as matrix inversion techniques. I became aware of his work in computing only in the 1970s when seeing the book "Introduction to the Theory of Sequential Machines" by Hartmanis and Stearns on the stacks in Hillman Library at Pitt piqued my interest enough to borrow and read it. A decade later it turned out that Stearns was a very senior colleague of mine at Albany; I was fortunate enough to sit in on his course on Game Theory, but unfortunate enough not to have worked with him.

I plan on watching the "Imagination Game" this weekend.

On Benford's Law and Accounting.

In my opinion it is not that Benford's law is over-rated, just that it is mechanically overworked with data in accounting. It is a very useful technique in accounting forensics and is in fact used extensively in practice.

It is our job as academics to provide a theoretical basis for its use rather than use it simply in a mechanical fashion. That is what people in other domains do. For example, parametric extensions of Benford's law have been shown to better approximate the behaviour of certain integer sequences (for example, prime numbers follow Benford's law asymptotically, but for smaller primes less than 10,000 they do not follow Benford's law at all but follow Pareto Benford law). Such extensions have been found to be useful in some domains. I can cite the following example among thousands that exist.

Dorp, J.R. van and S. Kotz (2002). The standard two-sided power distribution and its
properties : with applications in financial engineering. The American Statistician
56(2), 90-99.

Statisticians have looked at the problem from two different perspectives: 1. what are the common distributions that follow Benford's law (suggested by Theodore Hill in a paper in 1995), and 2. Find a process that generates Benfor'd compliant data. We in accounting need to ask the question what is the process that generates the data and then see under what conditions the data approximates Benford. My point is that most Benford studies in accounting I have seen (including the SSRN paper you sent the links to) have really no accounting content; they are merely mechanical application of Benford's law to accounting data.

And, most importantly, the discovery of the so-called Benford's law was not by Benford, but by the Canadian-American astronomer Simon Newcomb who, in 1881 in an article in the journal American Journal of Mathematics, expressed it as "The law of probability of the occurrence of numbers is such that all mantissae of their logarithms are equally likely".  Benford was only two years old when Newcomb wrote that paper. History has been rather cruel to Newcomb. (I am attaching to this message one of the best presentations of "Benford's" law I have seen).

Simon Newcomb not being remembered is probably his bad karma coming back to haunt him. He was a good friend of the Peirce family and in fact was a frequent guest at their house. However, he did not seem to like the Benjamin Peirce's son, one of my heroes Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce whom Bertrand Russell called "one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and certainly the greatest American thinker ever". The Santiago in his name was added to indicate CS Peirce's gratitude to his biggest supporter at Harvard, William James. Santiago is the Spanish for St. James.

Newcomb haunted CS Peirce most of his adult life and ensured that he did not succeed. When Peirce was up for tenure at Johns Hopkins and the president was about to sign his tenure,   Newcomb informed him that Peirce had lived and traveled with a woman who was not his wife (Peirce then was separated from his first wife but they were not divorced then; later they divorced and he married the lady). He was denied tenure. Later, towards the end of his life he had applied for a grant to publish his work to Carnegie Foundation, but was rejected, thanks to Newcomb who served on their board. Tragically, he spent much of his life in abject poverty, supported by his friends such as William James. John Dewey was a student of Peirce at Johns Hopkins.

Today, CS Peirce is revered around the world as one of the most profound philosophers, but Nwecomb is largely forgotten.  Provides some evidence that bad deeds do come back to haunt.