Monday 30 June, 2008

Uniqueness and Importance of Fingerprints

A fingerprint is perhaps one of the most interesting and unique feature of the human body. For over a century now it has been the primary method of identification of a person while lately though the iris matching method and face detection methods have also been developed. However, unlike the later two methods, fingerprints can be easily identified by even using a simple hand held magnifying glass.

It is interesting to note that although human had always had fingerprints, no one ever gave serious thought regarding their uniqueness until the advent of the 17th and the 18th century. I guess that it takes great persons to distinguish extraordinary from the ordinary things in life. An excellent example of this point is Sir Issac Newton. He saw an apple fall of a tree, an occurrence million of people, for thousands of generations must have seen happen, but never thought about its importance. The same way, the science of fingerprints identification and study has its fair share of heroes but all that will be discussed in the next lines of blogs.

Now discussing about the uniqueness fingerprints, it is very interesting to observe that the possibility's that two person will have the same print is next to impossible. Therefore, the fingerprints that you have are entirely yours. They represent your identity as a person. That is what makes it so special.

In the blogs to follow, I will make a serious attempt to present to you all the fundamentals of the science of fingerprint examination in a very simple and easy to understand manner. Please do reply with your comments which will be highly appreciated and in a way compensate for hard work done on my part in compiling the data to be put in these blogs.