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The Parrot's Theorem
''The Parrot's Theorem'' is a French novel written by Denis Guedj and published in 1998. An English translation was published in 2000. Plot summary The plot revolves around a household in Paris: Mr Ruche, an elderly wheelchair-using bookseller, his employee and housemate Perrette, and Perrette's three children – teenage twins and young Max, who is deaf. Max liberates a talking parrot at the market and Mr Ruche receives a consignment of mathematical books from an old friend, who has lived in Brazil for decades without any contact between the two. The household sets up its own exploration of mathematics in order to crack the code of the last messages from Mr Ruche's old friend, now apparently murdered. Mathematical topics covered in the book include primes and factors; irrational and amicable numbers; the discoveries of Pythagoras, Archimedes and Euclid; and the problems of squaring the circle and doubling the cube. The mathematics is real mathematics, woven into an histori ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frank Wynne
Frank Wynne (born 1962) is an Irish literary translator and writer. Biography Born in County Sligo in the west of Ireland, Frank Wynne worked as a comics editor at Fleetway and later at comic magazine '' Deadline''. He worked for a time at AOL, before becoming a literary translator. He has translated many authors, including Michel Houellebecq, Boualem Sansal, Frédéric Beigbeder and the late Ivoirian novelist Ahmadou Kourouma. He has twice jointly won the International Dublin Literary Award: with Houellebecq for '' Atomised'' (his translation of ''Les Particules élémentaires''); and with Alice Zeniter for ''The Art of Losing'' (his translation of ''L'Art de Perdre''). His translation of Frédéric Beigbeder's '' Windows on the World'', a novel set in the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York during the September 11, 2001 attacks, won the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Notably, he is a two-time winner of both the Scott Moncrieff Translation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Archimedes
Archimedes of Syracuse ( ; ) was an Ancient Greece, Ancient Greek Greek mathematics, mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and Invention, inventor from the ancient city of Syracuse, Sicily, Syracuse in History of Greek and Hellenistic Sicily, Sicily. Although few details of his life are known, based on his surviving work, he is considered one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity, and one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. Archimedes anticipated modern calculus and mathematical analysis, analysis by applying the concept of the Cavalieri's principle, infinitesimals and the method of exhaustion to derive and rigorously prove many geometry, geometrical theorem, theorems, including the area of a circle, the surface area and volume of a sphere, the area of an ellipse, the area under a parabola, the volume of a segment of a paraboloid of revolution, the volume of a segment of a hyperboloid of revolution, and the area of a spiral. Archimedes' other math ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Novels Set In Paris
A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and Publication, published as a book. The word derives from the for 'new', 'news', or 'short story (of something new)', itself from the , a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning 'new'. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek novel, Ancient Greek and Roman novel, Medieval Chivalric romance, and the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys, preferred the term Romance (literary fiction) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Novels About Mathematics
A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction usually written in prose and published as a book. The word derives from the for 'new', 'news', or 'short story (of something new)', itself from the , a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning 'new'. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, Medieval Chivalric romance, and the tradition of the Italian Renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, in the historical romances of Walter Scott and the Gothic novel. Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, and John Cowper Powys, preferred the term ''romance''. Such romances should not be confused with th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Books About Parrots
A book is a structured presentation of recorded information, primarily verbal and graphical, through a medium. Originally physical, electronic books and audiobooks are now existent. Physical books are objects that contain printed material, mostly of writing and images. Modern books are typically composed of many pages bound together and protected by a cover, what is known as the ''codex'' format; older formats include the scroll and the tablet. As a conceptual object, a ''book'' often refers to a written work of substantial length by one or more authors, which may also be distributed digitally as an electronic book (ebook). These kinds of works can be broadly classified into fiction (containing invented content, often narratives) and non-fiction (containing content intended as factual truth). But a physical book may not contain a written work: for example, it may contain ''only'' drawings, engravings, photographs, sheet music, puzzles, or removable content like paper dolls. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1998 French Novels
1998 was designated as the ''International Year of the Ocean''. Events January * January 6 – The ''Lunar Prospector'' spacecraft is launched into orbit around the Moon, and later finds evidence for frozen water, in soil in permanently shadowed craters near the Moon's poles. * January 11 – Over 100 people are killed in the Sidi-Hamed massacre in Algeria. * January 12 – Nineteen European nations agree to forbid human cloning. * January 17 – The ''Drudge Report'' breaks the story about U.S. President Bill Clinton's alleged affair with Monica Lewinsky, which will lead to the House of Representatives' impeachment of him. February * February 3 – Cavalese cable car disaster: A United States military pilot causes the deaths of 20 people near Trento, Italy, when his low-flying EA-6B Prowler severs the cable of a cable-car. * February 4 – The 5.9 Afghanistan earthquake shakes the Takhar Province with a maximum Mercalli intensity of VII (''Very strong''). With up to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Simon Singh
Simon Lehna Singh, (born 19 September 1964) is a British popular science author and theoretical and particle physicist. His written works include ''Fermat's Last Theorem'' (in the United States titled ''Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem''), '' The Code Book'' (about cryptography and its history), ''Big Bang'' (about the Big Bang theory and the origins of the universe), '' Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial'' (about complementary and alternative medicine, co-written by Edzard Ernst) and '' The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets'' (about mathematical ideas and theorems hidden in episodes of ''The Simpsons'' and ''Futurama''). In 2012 Singh founded the Good Thinking Society, through which he created the website "Parallel" to help students learn mathematics. Singh has also produced documentaries and works for television to accompany his books, is a trustee of the National Museum of Science and Industry, a patro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Universal Language
''The Universal Language'' is a short comedic play written by David Ives. The play is part of the collection of plays called ''All in the Timing.'' The show features two characters, Don and Dawn. Don is a con artist trying to swindle customers into learning a fraudulent language, Unamunda, and Dawn is a shy 28-year-old woman with a stutter. Through the course of the play, Don and Dawn learn about each other and themselves, and fall in love. Plot synopsis Dawn di Vito wanders into an office, hoping to learn Unamunda, an Esperanto-like language. Don Finninneganegan, the inventor of the language, appears suddenly, speaking rapidly in the made-up language. Dawn becomes confused, thinking she has the wrong address. Don manages to reassure her that she is in the right place, despite the language barrier. Dawn quickly becomes fascinated by Unamunda, and agrees to pay $500 to learn the language. Soon, Dawn is as fluent as Don, and she notices that the stutter she once had is gone. She vo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Forrest Library
Forrest may refer to: Places Australia *Forrest, Australian Capital Territory *Forrest, Victoria, a small rural township *Division of Forrest, a federal division of the Australian House of Representatives, in Western Australia *Electoral district of Forrest, Western Australia, an electoral district from 1904 to 1950 *Forrest Land District, Western Australia, a cadastral division *Forrest, Western Australia, a small settlement and railway station **Forrest Airport *Forrest River, Western Australia *Forrest Highway, Western Australia United States *Forrest, Illinois, a village *Forrest City, Arkansas *Forrest Township, Livingston County, Illinois *Forrest County, Mississippi *Camp Forrest, an American World War II training base in Tullahoma, Tennessee Elsewhere * Forrest Pass, Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica *Forrest, Manitoba, Canada, a small town *Forrest Road, a street in Edinburgh, Scotland People and fictional characters *Forrest (surname) *Forrest (given name) * Forrest (singer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Doubling The Cube
Doubling the cube, also known as the Delian problem, is an ancient geometry, geometric problem. Given the Edge (geometry), edge of a cube, the problem requires the construction of the edge of a second cube whose volume is double that of the first. As with the related problems of squaring the circle and trisecting the angle, doubling the cube is now known to be impossible to construct by using only a compass and straightedge, but even in ancient times solutions were known that employed other methods. According to Eutocius, Archytas was the first to solve the problem of doubling the cube (the so-called Delian problem) with an ingenious geometric construction. The nonexistence of a compass-and-straightedge solution was finally proven by Pierre Wantzel in 1837. In algebraic terms, doubling a unit cube requires the construction of a line segment of length , where ; in other words, , the cube root of two. This is because a cube of side length 1 has a volume of , and a cube of twice tha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Squaring The Circle
Squaring the circle is a problem in geometry first proposed in Greek mathematics. It is the challenge of constructing a square (geometry), square with the area of a circle, area of a given circle by using only a finite number of steps with a compass and straightedge. The difficulty of the problem raised the question of whether specified axioms of Euclidean geometry concerning the existence of Line (geometry), lines and circles implied the existence of such a square. In 1882, the task was proven to be impossible, as a consequence of the Lindemann–Weierstrass theorem, which proves that pi (\pi) is a transcendental number. That is, \pi is not the zero of a function, root of any polynomial with Rational number, rational coefficients. It had been known for decades that the construction would be impossible if \pi were transcendental, but that fact was not proven until 1882. Approximate constructions with any given non-perfect accuracy exist, and many such constructions have been f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Euclid
Euclid (; ; BC) was an ancient Greek mathematician active as a geometer and logician. Considered the "father of geometry", he is chiefly known for the '' Elements'' treatise, which established the foundations of geometry that largely dominated the field until the early 19th century. His system, now referred to as Euclidean geometry, involved innovations in combination with a synthesis of theories from earlier Greek mathematicians, including Eudoxus of Cnidus, Hippocrates of Chios, Thales and Theaetetus. With Archimedes and Apollonius of Perga, Euclid is generally considered among the greatest mathematicians of antiquity, and one of the most influential in the history of mathematics. Very little is known of Euclid's life, and most information comes from the scholars Proclus and Pappus of Alexandria many centuries later. Medieval Islamic mathematicians invented a fanciful biography, and medieval Byzantine and early Renaissance scholars mistook him for the earlier philo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
