Go (game)
Go is an abstract strategy board game for two players, in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent. The game was invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day. A 2016 survey by the International Go Federation's 75 member nations found that there are over 46 million people worldwide who know how to play Go and over 20 million current players, the majority of whom live in East Asia; the playing pieces are called "stones". One player uses the other, black; the players take. Once placed on the board, stones may not be moved, but stones are removed from the board if "captured". Capture happens when a stone or group of stones is surrounded by opposing stones on all orthogonally-adjacent points; the game proceeds. When a game concludes, the winner is determined by counting each player's surrounded territory along with captured stones and komi. Games may be terminated by resignation. A teacher might simplify the explanation by saying to a student "you may place your stone on any point on the board, but if I surround that stone, I will remove it."
The standard Go board has a 19×19 grid of lines, containing 361 points. Beginners play on smaller 9×9 and 13×13 boards, archaeological evidence shows that the game was played in earlier centuries on a board with a 17×17 grid. However, boards with a 19×19 grid had become standard by the time the game had reached Korea in the 5th century CE and Japan in the 7th century CE. Go was considered one of the four essential arts of the cultured aristocratic Chinese scholars in antiquity; the earliest written reference to the game is recognized as the historical annal Zuo Zhuan. Despite its simple rules, Go is complex. Compared to chess, Go has both a larger board with more scope for play and longer games, and, on average, many more alternatives to consider per move; the lower bound on the number of legal board positions in Go has been estimated to be 2 x 10170. The word "Go" is derived from the full Japanese name igo, derived from its Chinese name weiqi, which translates as "board game of surrounding" or "encircling game".
To differentiate the game from the common English verb to go, "g" is capitalized, or, in events sponsored by the Ing Chang-ki Foundation, it is spelled "goe". The Korean word baduk derives from the Middle Korean word Badok, the origin of, controversial. Less plausible etymologies include a derivation of "Badukdok", referring to the playing pieces of the game, or a derivation from Chinese 排子, meaning "to arrange pieces". Go is an adversarial game with the objective of surrounding a larger total area of the board with one's stones than the opponent; as the game progresses, the players position stones on the board to map out formations and potential territories. Contests between opposing formations are extremely complex and may result in the expansion, reduction, or wholesale capture and loss of formation stones. A basic principle of Go is that a group of stones must have at least one "liberty" to remain on the board. A "liberty" is an open "point" bordering the group. An enclosed liberty is called an "eye", a group of stones with two or more eyes is said to be unconditionally "alive".
Such groups cannot be captured if surrounded. The general strategy is to expand one's territory, attack the opponent's weak groups, always stay mindful of the "life status" of one's own groups; the liberties of groups are countable. Situations where mutually opposing groups must capture each other or die are called capturing races, or semeai. In a capturing race, the group with more liberties will be able to capture the opponent's stones. Capturing races and the elements of life or death are the primary challenges of Go. A player may pass on determining; the game ends when both players pass, is scored. For each player, the number of captured stones is subtracted from the number of controlled points in "liberties" or "eyes", the player with the greater score wins the game. Games may be won by resignation of the opponent. In the opening stages of the game, players establish positions in the corners and around the sides of the board; these bases help to develop strong shapes which have many options for life and establish formations for potential territory.
Players start in the corners because establishing territory is easier with the aid of two edges of the board. Established corner opening sequences are called "joseki" and are studied independently."Dame" are points that lie in between the boundary walls of black and white, as such are considered to be of no value to either side. "Seki" are mutually alive pairs of black groups where neither has two eyes. A "ko" is a repeated-position shape. After the forcing move is played, the ko may be "taken back" and returned to its original position; some "ko fights" may be important and decide the life of a large group, while others may be worth just one or two points. Some ko fights
Renaissance Technologies
Renaissance Technologies LLC is an American hedge fund firm based in East Setauket, New York, on Long Island, which specializes in systematic trading using quantitative models derived from mathematical and statistical analyses. The company was founded in 1982 by James Simons, an award-winning mathematician and former Cold War code breaker. In 1988, the firm established its most profitable portfolio, the Medallion Fund, which used an improved and expanded form of Leonard Baum's mathematical models, improved by algebraist James Ax, to explore correlations from which they could profit. Simons and Ax started a hedge fund and named it Medallion in honor of the math awards that they had won. Renaissance's flagship Medallion fund, run for fund employees, "is famed for one of the best records in investing history, returning more than 35 percent annualized over a 20-year span". From 1994 through mid-2014 it averaged a 71.8% annual return. Renaissance offers two portfolios to outside investors—Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund and Renaissance Institutional Diversified Alpha.
Simons ran Renaissance until his retirement in late 2009. The company is now run by Peter Brown, both of them were computer scientists specializing in computational linguistics who joined Renaissance in 1993 from IBM Research. Simons continues to play a role at the firm as non-executive chairman and remains invested in its funds the secretive and profitable black-box strategy known as Medallion; because of the success of Renaissance in general and Medallion in particular, Simons has been described as the best money manager on earth. By October 2015, Renaissance had $65 billion worth of assets under management, most of which belong to employees of the firm. James Simons founded Renaissance Technologies following a decade as the Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Stony Brook University. Simons is a 1976 recipient of the Oswald Veblen Prize of the American Mathematical Society, geometry’s highest honor, he is known in the scientific community for his work, Chern–Simons theory, fundamental in modern theoretical physics, including advanced theories of how invisible fields like those of gravity interact with matter to produce everything from superstrings to black holes.
The firm is an early pioneer of quantitative trading, where researchers tap decades of diverse data in its vast petabyte-scale data warehouse to assess statistical probabilities for the direction of securities prices in any given market. Experts attribute the breadth of data on events peripheral to financial and economic phenomena that Renaissance takes into account, the firm's ability to manipulate enormous amounts of data by deploying efficient and scalable technological architectures for computation and execution, for its consistent success in beating the markets. In many ways, Renaissance Technologies, along with a few other firms, has been synthesizing terabytes of data daily and extracting information signals from petabytes of data for two decades now, well before big data and data analytics caught the imagination of mainstream technology. For more than twenty years, the firm's Renaissance Technologies hedge fund, which trades in markets around the world, has employed complex mathematical models to analyze and execute trades, many of them automated.
The firm uses computer-based models to predict price changes in traded financial instruments. These models are based on analyzing as much data as can be gathered looking for non-random movements to make predictions; some attribute the firm's performance to employing financial signal processing techniques such as pattern recognition. The book The Quants describes the hiring of speech recognition experts, many from IBM, including the current leaders of the firm. Renaissance employs specialists with non-financial backgrounds, including mathematicians, signal processing experts and statisticians; the firm's latest fund is the Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund. RIEF has trailed the firm's better-known Medallion fund, a separate fund that contains only the personal money of the firm's executives. In a 2013 article in The Daily Telegraph, journalist Sarfraz Manzoor described Renaissance staff as math geniuses running Wall Street. "Of his 200 employees, ensconced in a fortress-like building in unfashionable Long Island, New York, a third have PhDs, not in finance, but in fields like physics and statistics.
Renaissance has been called “the best physics and mathematics department in the world” and, according to Weatherall, “avoids hiring anyone with the slightest whiff of Wall Street bona fides. Renaissance is a firm run by and for scientists, employing preferably those with non-financial backgrounds for quantitative finance research like mathematicians, statisticians and experimental physicists and computer scientists. Wall Street experience is frowned on and a flair for science is prized, it is a held belief within Renaissance that the herdlike mentality among business school graduates is to blame for poor investor returns. Renaissance engages 150 researchers and computer programmers, half of whom have PhDs in scientific disciplines, at its tranquil 50-acre East Setauket campus in Long Island, New York, near the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Mathematician Isadore Singer referred to Renaissance's East Setauket office as the best physics and mathematics department in the world; the firm’s administrative and back-office functions are handled from its Manhattan office in New York City.
The firm is intensely secretive about the inner workings of its business and little is known about it. The firm is known for its ability to recruit and retain top scienti
Richard K. Guy
Richard Kenneth Guy is a British mathematician, professor emeritus in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Calgary. He is known for his work in number theory, recreational mathematics and graph theory, he is best known for co-authorship of Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays and authorship of Unsolved Problems in Number Theory. He has published over 300 papers. Guy proposed the tongue-in-cheek "Strong Law of Small Numbers," which says there are not enough small integers available for the many tasks assigned to them – thus explaining many coincidences and patterns found among numerous cultures. For this paper he received the MAA Lester R. Ford Award. Guy was born 30 September 1916 in Nuneaton, England, to Adeline Augusta Tanner and William Alexander Charles Guy. Both of his parents were teachers, rising to the rank of headmistress and headmaster, respectively, he attended Warwick School for Boys, the third oldest school in Britain, but was not enthusiastic about most of the curriculum.
He was good at sports and excelled in mathematics. At the age of 17 he read Dickson's History of the Theory of Numbers, he said it was better than "the whole works of Shakespeare." His future was set. By he had developed a passion for mountain climbing. In 1935 Guy entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge as a result of winning several scholarships. To win the most important of these he had to write exams for two days, his interest in games began while at Cambridge. In 1938, he graduated with a second-class honours degree. Although his parents advised against it, Guy decided to become a teacher and got a teaching diploma at the University of Birmingham, he met his future wife Nancy Louise Thirian through her brother Michael, a fellow scholarship winner at Gonville and Caius College. He and Louise shared loves of mountains and dancing, he wooed her through correspondence, they married in December 1940. In November 1942, Guy received an emergency commission in the Meteorological Branch of the Royal Air Force, with the rank of flight lieutenant.
He was posted to Reykjavik, to Bermuda, as a meteorologist. He was refused. While in Iceland, he did some glacier travel and mountain climbing, marking the beginning of another long love affair, this one with snow and ice; when Guy returned to England after the war, he went back to teaching, this time at Stockport Grammar School, but stayed only two years. In 1947 the family moved to London. In 1951 he moved to Singapore, where he taught at the University of Malaya until 1962, he spent a few years at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, India. While they were in India, he and Louise went mountaineering in the foothills of the Himalayas. Guy moved to Canada in 1965, settling down at the University of Calgary in Alberta, where he obtained a professorship. Though he retired in 1982, he still goes to the office five days a week to work now at the age of 100. In 1991 the University of Calgary awarded him an Honorary Doctorate. Guy claims that they gave him the degree out of embarrassment, but the university tells it differently saying, "his extensive research efforts and prolific writings in the field of number theory and combinatorics have added much to the underpinnings of game theory and its extensive application to many forms of human activity."
Guy and his wife Louise remained committed to mountain hiking and environmentalism all their lives. In 2014, he donated $100,000 to the Alpine Club of Canada for the training of amateur leaders; the Alpine Club has in turn honoured them by building the Louise & Richard Guy Hut near the base of Mont des Poilus. He has three children, among mathematician Michael J. T. Guy. While teaching in Singapore in 1960 Guy met the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős. Erdős was noted for posing and solving difficult mathematical problems and shared several of them with Guy. Guy says, "I made some progress in each of them; this gave me encouragement, I began to think of myself as being something of a research mathematician, which I hadn't done before." He wrote four papers with Erdős, giving him an Erdős number of 1. He solved one of Erdős' problems. Guy has written two books devoted to them. Many number theorists got their start trying to solve problems from Unsolved problems in number theory. Guy describes himself as an amateur mathematician but he is more than that.
In a career that spans eight decades he has written or co-authored over a dozen books and collaborated with some of the great mathematicians of the 20th century. Paul Erdős, John H. Conway, Donald Knuth, Martin Gardner are among his collaborators, as are Elwyn Berlekamp, John L. Selfridge, Kenneth Falconer, Frank Harary, Lee Sallows, Gerhard Ringel, Béla Bollobás, C. B. Lacampagne, Bruce Sagan, Neil Sloane. Guy is one of the key people in the field of recreational mathematics. In 1998 Martin Gardner wrote, "Conway collaborated with fellow mathematicians Richard Guy and Elwyn Berlekamp on what I consider the greatest contribution to recreational mathematics in this century, a two-volume work called Winning Ways." In fact, Guy was considered as a replacement for Gardner when the latter retired from the Mathematical Games column at Scientific American. Along with Bill Gosper, Guy has been one of the principal resear
John Horton Conway
John Horton Conway is an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He has contributed to many branches of recreational mathematics, notably the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life. Conway spent the first half of his long career at the University of Cambridge, in England, the second half at Princeton University in New Jersey, where he now holds the title Professor Emeritus. Conway was born in the son of Cyril Horton Conway and Agnes Boyce, he became interested in mathematics at a early age. By the age of eleven his ambition was to become a mathematician. After leaving sixth form, Conway entered Caius College, Cambridge to study mathematics. Conway, a "terribly introverted adolescent" in school, interpreted his admission to Cambridge as an opportunity to transform himself into a new person: an "extrovert", he was awarded his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1959 and began to undertake research in number theory supervised by Harold Davenport.
Having solved the open problem posed by Davenport on writing numbers as the sums of fifth powers, Conway began to become interested in infinite ordinals. It appears that his interest in games began during his years studying the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, where he became an avid backgammon player, spending hours playing the game in the common room, he was awarded his doctorate in 1964 and was appointed as College Fellow and Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. After leaving Cambridge in 1986, he took up the appointment to the John von Neumann Chair of Mathematics at Princeton University. Conway is known for the invention of the Game of Life, one of the early examples of a cellular automaton, his initial experiments in that field were done with pen and paper, long before personal computers existed. Since the game was introduced by Martin Gardner in Scientific American in 1970, it has spawned hundreds of computer programs, web sites, articles, it is a staple of recreational mathematics.
There is an extensive wiki devoted to cataloging the various aspects of the game. From the earliest days it has been a favorite in computer labs, both for its theoretical interest and as a practical exercise in programming and data display. At times Conway has said he hates the Game of Life–largely because it has come to overshadow some of the other deeper and more important things he has done; the game did help launch a new branch of mathematics, the field of cellular automata. The Game of Life is now known to be Turing complete. Conway's career is intertwined with mathematics popularizer and Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner; when Gardner featured Conway's Game of Life in his Mathematical Games column in October 1970, it became the most read of all his columns and made Conway an instant celebrity. Gardner and Conway had first corresponded in the late 1950s, over the years Gardner had written about recreational aspects of Conway's work. For instance, he discussed Conway's game of Sprouts and his angel and devil problem.
In the September 1976 column he reviewed Conway's book On Numbers and Games and introduced the public to Conway's surreal numbers. Conferences called Gathering 4 Gardner are held every two years to celebrate the legacy of Martin Gardner, Conway himself has been a featured speaker at these events, discussing various aspects of recreational mathematics. Conway is known for his contributions to combinatorial game theory, a theory of partisan games; this he developed with Elwyn Berlekamp and Richard Guy, with them co-authored the book Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays. He wrote the book On Numbers and Games which lays out the mathematical foundations of CGT, he is one of the inventors of sprouts, as well as philosopher's football. He developed detailed analyses of many other games and puzzles, such as the Soma cube, peg solitaire, Conway's soldiers, he came up with the angel problem, solved in 2006. He invented a new system of numbers, the surreal numbers, which are related to certain games and have been the subject of a mathematical novel by Donald Knuth.
He invented a nomenclature for exceedingly large numbers, the Conway chained arrow notation. Much of this is discussed in the 0th part of ONAG. In the mid-1960s with Michael Guy, son of Richard Guy, Conway established that there are sixty-four convex uniform polychora excluding two infinite sets of prismatic forms, they discovered the grand antiprism in the only non-Wythoffian uniform polychoron. Conway has suggested a system of notation dedicated to describing polyhedra called Conway polyhedron notation. In the theory of tessellations, he devised the Conway criterion which describes rules for deciding if a prototile will tile the plane, he investigated lattices in higher dimensions, was the first to determine the symmetry group of the Leech lattice. In knot theory, Conway formulated a new variation of the Alexander polynomial and produced a new invariant now called the Conway polynomial. After lying dormant for more than a decade, this concept became central to work in the 1980s on the novel knot polynomials.
Conway further developed tangle theory and invented a system of notation for tabulating knots, nowadays known as Conway notation, while correcting a number of errors in the 19th century knot tables and extending them to include all but four of the non-alternating primes with 11 crossings. See Topology Proceedings 7 118, he was the primary author of the ATLAS of Finite Groups giving prope
James Harris Simons
James Harris Simons known as Jim Simons is an American mathematician, billionaire hedge fund manager, philanthropist. He is known as a quantitative investor and in 1982 founded Renaissance Technologies, a private hedge fund based in Setauket-East Setauket, New York. Although Simons retired from the fund in 2009, he remains its non-executive adviser, he is known for his studies on pattern recognition. He developed the Chern–Simons form, contributed to the development of string theory by providing a theoretical framework to combine geometry and topology with quantum field theory. From 1968 to 1978, Simons was a mathematics professor and subsequent chair of the mathematics department at Stony Brook University; as reported by Forbes, his net worth as of February 2019 is estimated to be $21.5 billion. In 2016, asteroid 6618 Jimsimons, discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1936, was named after Simons by the International Astronomical Union in honor of his contributions to mathematics and philanthropy. James Harris Simons was born on April 25, 1938 to an American Jewish family, the only child of Marcia and Matthew Simons, raised in Brookline, Massachusetts.
His father owned a shoe factory. When James Simons was a teenager, he worked a job in the basement stockroom of a garden supply store, his inefficiency at the job resulted in his demotion as a floor sweeper. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1958 and a PhD in mathematics, from the University of California, under supervision of Bertram Kostant in 1961, at the age of 23. Simons' mathematical work has focused on the geometry and topology of manifolds, his 1962 Berkeley PhD thesis, written under the direction of Bertram Kostant, gave a new and more conceptual proof of Berger's classification of the holonomy groups of Riemannian manifolds, now a cornerstone of modern geometry. He subsequently began to work with Shing-Shen Chern on the theory of characteristic classes discovering the Chern–Simons secondary characteristic classes of 3-manifolds, which are related to the Yang-Mills functional on 4-manifolds, have had a profound effect on modern physics.
These and other contributions to geometry and topology led to Simons becoming the 1976 recipient of the AMS Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry. In 2014, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. In 1964, Simons worked with the National Security Agency to break codes. Between 1964 and 1968, he was on the research staff of the Communications Research Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses and taught mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University joining the faculty at Stony Brook University. In 1968, he was appointed chairman of the math department at Stony Brook University. Simons was asked by IBM in 1973 to attack the block cipher Lucifer, an early but direct precursor to the Data Encryption Standard. Simons founded Math for America, a nonprofit organization, in January 2004 with a mission to improve mathematics education in United States public schools by recruiting more qualified teachers, he funds a variety of research projects. For more than two decades, Simons' Renaissance Technologies' hedge funds, which trade in markets around the world, have employed mathematical models to analyze and execute trades, many automated.
Renaissance uses computer-based models to predict price changes in financial instruments. These models are based on analyzing as much data as can be gathered looking for non-random movements to make predictions. Renaissance employs specialists with non-financial backgrounds, including mathematicians, signal processing experts and statisticians; the firm's latest fund is the Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund. RIEF has trailed the firm's better-known Medallion fund, a separate fund that contains only the personal money of the firm's executives. "It's startling to see such a successful mathematician achieve success in another field," says Edward Witten, professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, considered by many of his peers to be the most accomplished theoretical physicist alive... In 2006, Simons was named Financial Engineer of the Year by the International Association of Financial Engineers. In 2007, he was estimated to have earned $2.8 billion, $1.7 billion in 2006, $1.5 billion in 2005, $670 million in 2004.
Simons shuns the limelight and gives interviews, citing Benjamin the Donkey in Animal Farm for explanation: "God gave me a tail to keep off the flies. But I'd rather have had no tail and no flies." On October 10, 2009, Simons announced he would retire on January 1, 2010 but remain at Renaissance as nonexecutive chairman. In 1996, his son Paul, aged 34, was riding a bicycle. In 2003, his son Nicholas, aged 24, drowned on a trip to Indonesia, his son Nat Simons is an philanthropist. Simons is a major contributor to Democratic Party political action committees. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Simons is ranked the #5 donor to federal candidates in the 2016 election cycle, coming behind co-CEO Robert Mercer, ranked #1 and donates to Republicans. Simons has donated $7 million to Hillary Clinton's Priorities USA Action, $2.6 million to the House and Senate Majority PACs, $500,000 to EMILY's List. He donated $25,000 to Republican Senator Lindsey Graham's super PAC. Since 2006 Simons has contributed about $30.6 million to federal campaigns.
Since 1990, Renaissance Technologies has contributed $59,081,152 to
Fox games
Fox games are a category of board games for two players, where one player is the fox and tries to eat the geese/sheep, the opposing player directs the geese/sheep and attempts to trap the fox, or reach a destination on the board. In another variant and Hounds, the fox tries to evade the hounds. There are several versions known: in Britain, Italy, Netherlands, Sápmi, Iceland, Slovakia and Nepal; the game Halatafl is known from at least as early as the 14th century, it is mentioned in Grettis saga. It originated in Scandinavia, as a variant of Tafl. In fact, Halatafl is still played in Scandinavia with rules similar to Tafl. Edward IV of England is known to have purchased two foxes and 26 hounds to form two sets of Marelles, believed to be Fox and Hounds; as Fox and Geese, the game was a favorite pastime of Queen Victoria. Halatafl means "tail board", in Old Norse, "tail" refers to a fox's tail; as in Grettis saga, rävspelet pegs. There are two fox pegs and 20 sheep pegs. Like the original game, the objective is for the defender to reach a certain destination on the board, the square of nine holes marked with red, it is the attacker's objective to stop the defender from reaching it.
The foxes are placed in the corners on the bottom of the red square, whereas the sheep are placed on the opposite side of the board. When the players have decided who will move first, they move one step in turns; the sheep may only move forward or sideways, while the foxes may move in any direction backwards. If a sheep is in front of an empty hole, the fox has to jump over and capture the sheep, as in checkers; the capturing is mandatory. The sheep have won if they manage to fill the red square. In the English-speaking world a simplified version is known as Geese. In this version the objective of reaching a certain location has been removed and instead it all comes down to capturing each other's pieces, it is not mandatory for the fox to capture the opponent's pieces, there are no restraints on the defender's movements. The fox is placed in the middle of the board, 13 geese are placed on one side of the board; the fox and geese can move to any empty space around them. The fox can jump over geese like in checkers.
Repeated jumps are possible. Geese can not jump. Unlike in Halatafl, capturing is not mandatory; the geese win. The fox wins; the traditional game with 13 geese gives the advantage to the fox. There are more balanced game variants with two foxes; this version is played on an 8×8 chess/checkerboard. As in draughts, only the dark squares are used; the four hounds are placed on the dark squares at one edge of the board. The objective of the fox is to cross from one side of the board to the other, arriving at any one of the hounds' original squares; the hounds move like a draughts man, diagonally forward one square. The fox moves like diagonally forward or backward one square; however there is no promotion, or removal of pieces. The play alternates with the fox moving first; the player controlling the hounds may move only one of them each turn. The fox is trapped, it is possible for two hounds to trap the fox against an edge of the board or one corner where a single hound may do the trapping. Should a hound reach the fox's original home row it will be unable to move further.
Perfect play will result in a "hounds" victory if the fox is allowed to choose any starting square and to pass his turn once during the game, as demonstrated in Winning Ways. Asalto Peg solitaire - originating as a variant of the Fox games. Tafl games Bibliography Murray, H. J. R.. A History of Board-Games Other than Chess. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-827401-7. Sackson, Sid; the Book of Classic Board Games. Klutz Press, Palo Alto, CA. ISBN 0-932592-94-5; the Tafl Family History of Tafl games
Electrical engineering
Electrical engineering is a professional engineering discipline that deals with the study and application of electricity and electromagnetism. This field first became an identifiable occupation in the half of the 19th century after commercialization of the electric telegraph, the telephone, electric power distribution and use. Subsequently and recording media made electronics part of daily life; the invention of the transistor, the integrated circuit, brought down the cost of electronics to the point they can be used in any household object. Electrical engineering has now divided into a wide range of fields including electronics, digital computers, computer engineering, power engineering, telecommunications, control systems, radio-frequency engineering, signal processing and microelectronics. Many of these disciplines overlap with other engineering branches, spanning a huge number of specializations such as hardware engineering, power electronics and waves, microwave engineering, electrochemistry, renewable energies, electrical materials science, much more.
See glossary of electrical and electronics engineering. Electrical engineers hold a degree in electrical engineering or electronic engineering. Practising engineers may be members of a professional body; such bodies include the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Institution of Engineering and Technology. Electrical engineers work in a wide range of industries and the skills required are variable; these range from basic circuit theory to the management skills required of a project manager. The tools and equipment that an individual engineer may need are variable, ranging from a simple voltmeter to a top end analyzer to sophisticated design and manufacturing software. Electricity has been a subject of scientific interest since at least the early 17th century. William Gilbert was a prominent early electrical scientist, was the first to draw a clear distinction between magnetism and static electricity, he is credited with establishing the term "electricity". He designed the versorium: a device that detects the presence of statically charged objects.
In 1762 Swedish professor Johan Carl Wilcke invented a device named electrophorus that produced a static electric charge. By 1800 Alessandro Volta had developed the voltaic pile, a forerunner of the electric battery In the 19th century, research into the subject started to intensify. Notable developments in this century include the work of Hans Christian Ørsted who discovered in 1820 that an electric current produces a magnetic field that will deflect a compass needle, of William Sturgeon who, in 1825 invented the electromagnet, of Joseph Henry and Edward Davy who invented the electrical relay in 1835, of Georg Ohm, who in 1827 quantified the relationship between the electric current and potential difference in a conductor, of Michael Faraday, of James Clerk Maxwell, who in 1873 published a unified theory of electricity and magnetism in his treatise Electricity and Magnetism. In 1782 Georges-Louis Le Sage developed and presented in Berlin the world's first form of electric telegraphy, using 24 different wires, one for each letter of the alphabet.
This telegraph connected two rooms. It was an electrostatic telegraph. In 1795, Francisco Salva Campillo proposed an electrostatic telegraph system. Between 1803-1804, he worked on electrical telegraphy and in 1804, he presented his report at the Royal Academy of Natural Sciences and Arts of Barcelona. Salva’s electrolyte telegraph system was innovative though it was influenced by and based upon two new discoveries made in Europe in 1800 – Alessandro Volta’s electric battery for generating an electric current and William Nicholson and Anthony Carlyle’s electrolysis of water. Electrical telegraphy may be considered the first example of electrical engineering. Electrical engineering became a profession in the 19th century. Practitioners had created a global electric telegraph network and the first professional electrical engineering institutions were founded in the UK and USA to support the new discipline. Francis Ronalds created an electric telegraph system in 1816 and documented his vision of how the world could be transformed by electricity.
Over 50 years he joined the new Society of Telegraph Engineers where he was regarded by other members as the first of their cohort. By the end of the 19th century, the world had been forever changed by the rapid communication made possible by the engineering development of land-lines, submarine cables, from about 1890, wireless telegraphy. Practical applications and advances in such fields created an increasing need for standardised units of measure, they led to the international standardization of the units volt, coulomb, ohm and henry. This was achieved at an international conference in Chicago in 1893; the publication of these standards formed the basis of future advances in standardisation in various industries, in many countries, the definitions were recognized in relevant legislation. During these years, the study of electricity was considered to be a subfield of physics since the early electrical technology was considered electromechanical in nature; the Technische Universität Darmstadt founded the world's first department of electrical engineering in 1882.
The first electrical engineering degree program was started at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the physics department
