The origins of the Sousa plaque are involved in a deep mystery. Some say it originally came from an old grocery store in Portugal, but this is just one of the stories. Some other people believe that the plaque came originally from the United States and trace its origins back to 1941, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So, sit back and hold your breath, for this is the story I am about to uncover today.
Our story begins in early XX century Vienna. Johann Oliveira de Sousa was an Austrian preeminent mathematician and philosopher, of Portuguese Jewish origins. He is best known for his famous postulates on the Theory of Plain Happiness, which was the basis for his doctorate in the University of Vienna in the early 30s.
While studying in the Austrian capital, he participated in the Viennese cultural circles and eventually got in contact with people such as Sigmund Freud, Moritz Schlick and Kurt Godel. These contacts may have set Professor Sousa's life course. In 1936, after the infamous assassination of Moritz Schlick by a nazi student, Johann de Sousa followed Kurt Godel on an academic trip to the United States. Later that year, escaping from the ever growing claustrophobic political environment in Vienna, he accepted a lecturer position in the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Princeton, New Jersey. Godel would joined him 4 years later, in 1940, following his famous trip through the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok, from there to San Francisco and finally to Princeton.
In 1941, Professor Johann de Sousa left Princeton and moved to Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was a co-founder of the RISAS, the Research Institute for Simple Axiomatic Systems.
And this is where our story meets the Sousa plaque. In his quest for simplicity and minimalism, Professor Johann de Sousa ordered a plain plaque with the simple word "SOUSA" for his personal office door at Harvard. This behavior later become a leitmotiv of Professor Sousa's life: simplicity as a shortcut to happiness.
After Johann de Sousa's retirement in the late 70s, people lost track of the famous Sousa's plaque. Some people say that in the late 90s, right before the Professor's death, the plaque was handed over by himself to one of his most preeminent disciples, a young student simply known in the Harvard campus as "the cosmonaut".
How and why the plaque was recently seen in such different places as Lisbon, Madrid or Las Palmas is still a mystery. If you happen to know where the placa-sousa is, please fill in the survey below.
