A Czech prime minister and a Welsh wizard
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010230
The New York Times recently reported on the resignation of Czech prime minister Petr Nečas amid a corruption scandal. Hints of a romantic affair between Nečas and his glamorous and imperious chief of staff, Jana Nagyova, added spice to the story, but what really caught my eye was the former prime minster’s former profession: physicist.
Intrigued, I consulted Nečas’s Wikipedia entry and discovered that he had studied plasma physics and worked as an R&D engineer in the semiconductor industry. More intrigued, I looked on Google Scholar for any research papers he might have written. Unlike the former quantum chemist Angela Merkel, Nečas doesn’t have a scientific bibliography, at least not one that Google Scholar’s Web crawlers could find.
But the search did turn up something that interested me: a paper in the Central European Journal of Physics by David Nečas and Petr Klapetec. The journal was unfamiliar to me, but not the unusual first word of the title “Gwyddion: An open-source software for SPM data analysis.”
Gwyddion (or more usually Gwydion ) is a magician and hero in the mythology of my native Wales. He used his magical powers and considerable guile to battle and bewitch his opponents, of whom there were many.
Gwydion is also the name of a Portuguese heavy metal band. Formed in Lisbon in 1995, the band has released two full-length albums, Ynys Mön (2008) and Horn Triskelion (2010).
In case you didn’t know, SPM stands for scanning probe microscopy. Why did two Czech physicists name their microscopy software after a Welsh wizard? I found the answer on the extensive website that Nečas and Klapetec have put together to guide the software’s users:
As each software, also this project should have a name. To find an acronym that would represent SPM analysis software and starts with the letter “G” (as GNU GPL) was really hard. Try it.
Finally, we decided not to use acronyms. After some Googling for unused fancy names we have chosen the name Gwyddion [gwid-ee-ohn] (which would turn out to be not-so-unused later, unfortunately).
Name Gwyddion comes from Welsh mythology. According to information on the internet, he was referred to as master of illusion, a helper of humankind and a fighter against the greedy and small-minded. He supported the cultural arts and learning, and tried to stamp out ignorance.
As you can tell from this list of quantum chemistry and solid-state physics software, names as interesting as Gwyddion are rare. My favorite, until I encountered Gwyddion, was Schoonschip.
Devised in the early 1960s by particle physicist Martinus Veltman, the program was among the first capable of manipulating algebraic symbols. The name isn’t especially meaningful; it’s Dutch for “clean ship.” Veltman chose it because it would be annoyingly hard for nonspeakers of his native language to pronounce correctly.