Samuel Clemens based his works on things that occurred throughout his personal life. He gained many interests and talents while on the Mississippi River that contributed to his writings. Samuel Clemens was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri. He was two months premature. At the time of his birth, Haley’s comet was in…
“There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportions” (Biography on Poe 8). Edgar Alan Poe endured a very difficult life and this is evident in his literary style. He was once titled the “master of the macabre.” One of the aspects in his life with which he struggled was social isolation. He…
One of the greatest city states of all time was the city state of Athens from which we take many of our modern ways. Their government was a full democracy in which they had an assembly was all male citizens over 25 years old, they had a council of five hundred which was chosen by…
Caius Julius Caesar, a Roman consul, was a great leader and a terrible dictator. Many of his reforms were excellent, but he also was hungry for the power of Roman Dictator, which would give him absolute power for as long as he required it. Throughout his life he did many things including creating the calendar…
Anne Boleyn was a very important, if not the most important character in Anne of a Thousand Days. The way that she behaves, and the decisions that she makes, effect the way that the ends. For example, Anne could have refused to marry Henry, and could have run away. These actions and decisions would have…
The ancient Romans were similar to today’s generations in their eating habits but never ate three hearty meals a day. Ientaculum and prandium were merely appetizers that filled their stomachs until the large cena, the event they look forward to since awakening. They had names for their meals similar to ours, breakfast (ientaculum), lunch (prandium),…
All Quiet on the Western Front is a graphic depiction of the horrors of war. In the short note before Chapter One, Remarque lets the reader know exactly what themes he intends. War is a savage and gratuitous evil, war is unnatural, and war is responsible for the destruction of an entire generation. Remarque is…
The Arab League is a regional organization that was founded on March 22, 1945. The league’s function is to promote political cooperation among it’s member states, and to deal with disputes or any breaches of peace in the region. The league’s official name is the League of Arab States. The founding members of the league…
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…