![]() But Roman Polanski has made it all but impossible to do so with “An Officer and a Spy.” In general, I tend to be a die-hard believer in separating the man from the art. Nevertheless, what she articulated touched a nerve. Martel said she wouldn’t attend a gala dinner in honor of the movie, but staunchly defended the Venice Film Festival’s decision to program it. I'm Andy Boyd at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work.“I don’t separate the man from the art.” So said Lucrecia Martel, the Argentine filmmaker and president of this year’s Venice Film Festival jury, when asked at a press conference about “ J’Accuse (An Officer and a Spy),” the new Roman Polanski film. Political cartoon by JM Staniforth: The Personification of France, Marianne, struggles in an arena with a python representing the Dreyfus Affair, while other nations look on as the crowd. As the report by the three mathematicians points out, "the obscurity of system defends him against criticism, just as the cuttlefish surrounds itself with ink to escape its enemies."Īnd we're left with an important lesson: bad math, and bad logic, can change the course of history. But it was pseudoscience of the highest order. Drawing upon his experience measuring things, he created an abstruse theory for examining handwriting. After laying out a complete case, the report concludes, "the absurdity of is so evident it is hard to believe how long this discussion has gone on."īertillon's analysis was replete with flaws that extend far beyond mathematical missteps. Yet it's a form of reasoning Bertillon used throughout his handwriting analysis. But if I flip it a hundred times and observe ten or more heads there's nothing even worth noting. If I flip a coin ten times and every flip comes up heads we should rightly be suspicious. It opens by pointing out a common sense error. Ten years later the French government commissioned three of France's leading mathematicians - including world famous Henri Poincaré - to evaluate Bertillon's assessment. Dreyfus was found guilty.īordereau, Photo in 1994 Bertillon calculated the chance of certain similarities was so small that the traitorous memo must have been the work of Dreyfus. Math came into play when dealing with coincidences between the memo and a handwriting sample from Dreyfus. ![]() And even more, he didn't have a firm grasp of mathematics. ![]() It allowed police to connect a criminal record to an actual person before the days of fingerprints or DNA tests.īut for his many accomplishments, Bertillon wasn't a handwriting expert. The methods, popularly known as Bertillonage, were based on measuring criminals. Bertillon was famous throughout France and the Western world, the result of developing the first scientific methods for criminal forensics. Lacking an expert in handwriting analysis, the prosecution called upon Alphonse Bertillon as its expert witness. The sole piece of direct evidence against Dreyfus was the memo. Within a matter of weeks, Alfred Dreyfus, a rising young officer of Jewish descent, was arrested. The memo conveyed secret information about the French military, leading French Intelligence to seek a traitor. It's also a story of bad mathematics.Īt the core of the 1894 controversy was a memo discovered in the trash at the German embassy in Paris. The Dreyfus Affair is a tangled story of espionage, deceit, abuse of power, warring political factions, and the future of France in the twentieth century. It was a case of military injustice that threatened government stability and shaped the future of human rights. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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