Talk:Phillip Hagar Smith

Question on "Kurakawa's" contribution
According to "Smith chart" in Japanese wiki, "Kurakawa" is identical with "KUROKAWA Kaneyuki". It follows from Kurokawa's biography which says he was born in 1928 that he invented "the Smith chart" when he was 10 at oldest. --Forestia net (talk) 13:50, 16 November 2010 (UTC)


 * This was added by ChrisAngove (who, BTW, contributed a lot of good contents to the Smith chart article) on 2006-10-08 and removed  by Forestia net on 2010-12-22T17:50:24. See also: ja:%E3%83%8E%E3%83%BC%E3%83%88:%E3%82%B9%E3%83%9F%E3%82%B9%E3%83%81%E3%83%A3%E3%83%BC%E3%83%88 and ja:%E9%BB%92%E5%B7%9D%E5%85%BC%E8%A1%8C --Matthiaspaul (talk) 12:22, 24 June 2023 (UTC)
 * This was originally added to the English WP by Heron on 2004-06-12 and translated  to the Japanese WP by Asq on 2004-12-27 until it was deleted  by Forestia net on 2010-12-22. Someone in the Japanese WP assumed that "Kurakawa" is identical to "KUROKAWA Kaneyuki" (黒川兼行), but this is not necessarily true. The good thing is that Heron is still active in the English WP. Heron, do you still remember the circumstances of your edit and can you perhaps shed some light on your sources? Was this "Kurakawa" just a genuine mistake, or do we still need to search for references supporting this. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 21:03, 24 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Hi. I don't remember my source but I'll consult my reference books and get back to you if I find anything. Perplexingly, this source names a different Japanese engineer, Mizuhashi Tosaku. --Heron (talk) 11:22, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
 * And scroll down to the comment on this page for more clues to the Mizuhashi connection. --Heron (talk) 11:38, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
 * OK, finally, a proper reference to K. Kurokawa. It seems he was an inventor of S-parameters, not the Smith Chart. I don't know what prompted my edit in 2004 but it was apparently untrue. --Heron (talk) 11:47, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks for checking your sources. This is a good explanation, it could have happened to others as well. So we can finally put this to rest.
 * Regarding Tōsaku Mizuhas[h]i (水橋東作), I found out about him a couple of days ago as well (searching for sources for Kurokawa). And even more fascinating, there is another independent discoverer of these charts, Amiel R. Volpert (Амиэ́ль Р. Во́льперт).
 * Actually, when working on scientific or historic articles I often not only search for Western sources, but deliberately also try to find sources from the former East Bloc as well as from Japan and China in order to overcome the language barrier. For me as a German, it is often quite interesting to check former East German literature (instead of only West German sources) as they often discussed topics from a slightly different angle and cited Russian sources which were almost unknown in the West. I find many articles in the English Wikipedia to be written from a sometimes narrow Western (and even more so from an English) perspective only, leaving out huge portions of history and not mentioning important parallel (and sometimes even earlier) developments in other parts of the world. However, the English Wikipedia is also a great place to put these pieces of the puzzle together and eventually provide knowledge from an international perspective.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 00:28, 29 June 2023 (UTC)