The plot of The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy, can often be confusing and difficult to follow. The pages of this novel are filled with sex, scandal, and alcohol, but it provides for a very interesting and unique story. It all begins one day in the large Wessex village of Weydon-Priors. Michael Henchard, a…
Every company has what is known as a “signature piece,” that is, a work which expresses something about the artistic direction and the spirit of the company. For the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater that piece is Revelations. Choreographed and set to traditional music, Revelations was first performed at the Ninety-second Street YM-YWHA New York, NY.,…
ALLEGORY, pronounced AL uh gawr ee, is a story with more than one meaning. Most allegories have moral or religious meanings. Famous allegories include the fables attributed to Aesop, an ancient Greek writer. Aesop’s fables seem to describe the adventures of animals and human beings. But the author actually wanted to teach his readers something…
The ancient Kingdom of Macedonia, situated in the north of modern Greece, was established by Perdiccas I about 640 B.C. Perdiccas was a Dorian, although the Macedonian tribes included Thracian and Illyrian elements. Originally a semibarbarous and fragmented power, Macedon became tributary to Persia under the Persian kings Darius I and Xerxes I and thereafter…
Agamemnon is a confusing tale of the people that are waiting for the soldiers to get home from the Trojan War. Most of the play is the chorus singing about many of the things that happened during the war. The play also shows the disrespect the men had for women in that time period. In…
Charles Babbage may have spent his life in vain, trying to make a machine considered by most of his friends to be ridiculous. 150 years ago, Babbage drew hundreds of drawings projecting the fundamentals on which today’s computers are founded. But the technology was not there to meet his dreams. He was born on December…
Zeno of Elea was born in Elea, Italy, in 490 B.C. He died there in 430 B.C., in an attempt to oust the city’s tyrant. He was a noted pupil of Parmenides, from whom he learned most of his doctrines and political ideas. He believed that what exists is one, permanent, and unchanging. Zeno argued…
Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz are two of the most supreme intellects of the 17th century. They are both considered to be the inventors of Calculus. However, after a terrible dispute, Sir Isaac Newton took most of the credit. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a German philosopher, mathematician, and statesman born in the…
Trigonometry uses the fact that ratios of pairs of sides of triangles are functions of the angles. The basis for mensuration of triangles is the right-angled triangle. The term trigonometry means literally the measurement of triangles. Trigonometry is a branch of mathematics that developed from simple measurements. A theorem is the most important result in…
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902-1984), known as P. A. M. Dirac, was the fifteenth Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. He shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1933 with Erwin Schrodinger.[2] He is considered to be the founder of quantum mechanics, providing the transition from quantum theory. The Cambridge Philosophical Society awarded him the…
Leonhard Euler, (born April 15, 1707, died Sept. 18, 1783), was the most prolific mathematician in history. His 866 books and articles represent about one third of the entire body of research on mathematics, theoretical physics, and engineering mechanics published between 1726 and 1800. In pure mathematics, he integrated Leibniz’s differential calculus and Newton’s method…
Georg Cantor founded set theory and introduced the concept of infinite numbers with his discovery of cardinal numbers. He also advanced the study of trigonometric series and was the first to prove the nondenumerability of the real numbers. Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on March 3, 1845. His family…
The Fibonacci numbers were first discovered by a man named Leonardo Pisano. He was known by his nickname, Fibonacci. The Fibonacci sequence is a sequence in which each term is the sum of the 2 numbers preceding it. The first 10 Fibonacci numbers are: (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89).…
Geometry was thoroughly organized in about 300 BC, when the Greek mathematician Euclid gathered what was known at the time, added original work of his own, and arranged 465 propositions into 13 books, called ‘Elements’. The books covered not only plane and solid geometry but also much of what is now known as algebra, trigonometry,…
Blaise Pascal was born at Clermont, Auvergne, France on June 19, 1628. He was the son of Étienne Pascal, his father, and Antoinette Bégone, his mother who died when Blaise was only four years old. After her death, his only family was his father and his two sisters, Gilberte, and Jacqueline, both of whom played…
Apollonius was a great mathematician, known by his contempories as “The Great Geometer, “whose treatise Conics is one of the greatest scientific works from the ancient world. Most of his other treatises were lost, although their titles and a general indication of their contents were passed on by later writers, especially Pappus of Alexandria. As…
Ancient knowledge of the sciences was often wrong and wholly unsatisfactory by modern standards. However not all of the knowledge of the more learned peoples of the past was false. In fact without people like Euclid or Plato we may not have been as advanced in this age as we are. Mathematics is an adventure…
Gauss, Carl Friedrich (1777-1855). The German scientist and mathematician Gauss is frequently he was called the founder of modern mathematics. His work is astronomy and physics is nearly as significant as that in mathematics. Gauss was born on April 30, 1777 in Brunswick (now it is Western Germany). Many biographists think that he got his…
Robert Boyle is considered both the founder of modern chemistry and the greatest English scientist to live during the first thirty years of the existence of the Royal Society. He was not only a chemist and a physicist as we know him to be, but also an avid theologian, a philanthropist, an essayist, and a…
Genetic variation is the raw material for the plant breeder, who must often select from primitive and wild plants, including wild species, in search of new genes. The appearance of new diseases, new pests, or new virulent forms of disease causing organisms makes it imperative that the plant be preserved, because it offers a potential…
