1.
Order of Saint Benedict
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Each community within the order maintains its own autonomy, while the order itself represents their mutual interests. Internationally, the order is governed by the Benedictine Confederation, a body, established in 1883 by Pope Leo XIIIs Brief Summum semper, individuals whose communities are members of the order generally add the initials OSB after their names. The monastery at Subiaco in Italy, established by Saint Benedict of Nursia circa 529, was the first of the monasteries he founded. He later founded the Abbey of Monte Cassino, there is no evidence, however, that he intended to found an order and the Rule of Saint Benedict presupposes the autonomy of each community. It was from the monastery of St. Andrew in Rome that Augustine, the prior, at various stopping places during the journey, the monks left behind them traditions concerning their rule and form of life, and probably also some copies of the Rule. Lérins Abbey, for instance, founded by Honoratus in 375, probably received its first knowledge of the Benedictine Rule from the visit of St. Augustine, in Gaul and Switzerland, it supplemented the much stricter Irish or Celtic Rule introduced by Columbanus and others. In many monasteries it eventually displaced the earlier codes. Largely through the work of Benedict of Aniane, it became the rule of choice for monasteries throughout the Carolingian empire, Monastic scriptoria flourished from the ninth through the twelfth centuries. Sacred Scripture was always at the heart of every monastic scriptorium, as a general rule those of the monks who possessed skill as writers made this their chief, if not their sole active work. In the Middle Ages monasteries were founded by the nobility. Cluny Abbey was founded by William I, Duke of Aquitaine in 910, the abbey was noted for its strict adherence to the Rule of St. Benedict. The abbot of Cluny was the superior of all the daughter houses, one of the earliest reforms of Benedictine practice was that initiated in 980 by Romuald, who founded the Camaldolese community. The English Benedictine Congregation is the oldest of the nineteen Benedictine congregations, Augustine of Canterbury and his monks established the first English Benedictine monastery at Canterbury soon after their arrival in 597. Many of the sees of England were founded and governed by the Benedictines. Monasteries served as hospitals and places of refuge for the weak, the monks studied the healing properties of plants and minerals to alleviate the sufferings of the sick. Germany was evangelized by English Benedictines, willibrord and Boniface preached there in the seventh and eighth centuries and founded several abbeys. In the English Reformation, all monasteries were dissolved and their lands confiscated by the Crown, during the 19th century they were able to return to England, including to Selby Abbey in Yorkshire, one of the few great monastic churches to survive the Dissolution. St. Mildreds Priory, on the Isle of Thanet, Kent, was built in 1027 on the site of an abbey founded in 670 by the daughter of the first Christian King of Kent, currently the priory is home to a community of Benedictine nuns
2.
Theology
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Theology is the critical study of the nature of the divine. It is taught as a discipline, typically in universities, seminaries. Augustine of Hippo defined the Latin equivalent, theologia, as reasoning or discussion concerning the Deity, the term can, however, be used for a variety of different disciplines or fields of study. Theologians use various forms of analysis and argument to help understand, explain, test, critique, the English equivalent theology had evolved by 1362. Greek theologia was used with the discourse on god in the fourth century BC by Plato in The Republic, Book ii. Drawing on Greek Stoic sources, the Latin writer Varro distinguished three forms of discourse, mythical, rational and civil. Theologos, closely related to theologia, appears once in some manuscripts, in the heading to the book of Revelation, apokalypsis ioannoy toy theologoy. The Latin author Boethius, writing in the early 6th century, used theologia to denote a subdivision of philosophy as a subject of study, dealing with the motionless. Boethius definition influenced medieval Latin usage, Theology can also now be used in a derived sense to mean a system of theoretical principles, an ideology. They suggest the term is appropriate in religious contexts that are organized differently. Kalam. does not hold the place in Muslim thought that theology does in Christianity. To find an equivalent for theology in the Christian sense it is necessary to have recourse to several disciplines, and to the usul al-fiqh as much as to kalam. Jose Ignacio Cabezon, who argues that the use of theology is appropriate, can only do so, he says, I take theology not to be restricted to its etymological meaning. In that latter sense, Buddhism is of course atheological, rejecting as it does the notion of God, within Hindu philosophy, there is a solid and ancient tradition of philosophical speculation on the nature of the universe, of God and of the Atman. The Sanskrit word for the schools of Hindu philosophy is Darshana. Nevertheless, Jewish theology historically has been active and highly significant for Christian. It is sometimes claimed, however, that the Jewish analogue of Christian theological discussion would more properly be Rabbinical discussion of Jewish law, the history of the study of theology in institutions of higher education is as old as the history of such institutions themselves. Modern Western universities evolved from the institutions and cathedral schools of Western Europe during the High Middle Ages
3.
Lake Constance
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Lake Constance is a lake on the Rhine at the northern foot of the Alps, and consists of three bodies of water, the Obersee, the Untersee, and a connecting stretch of the Rhine, called the Seerhein. The lake is situated in Germany, Switzerland and Austria near the Alps and its shorelines lie in the German states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, the Austrian state of Vorarlberg, and the Swiss cantons of Thurgau, St Gallen and Schaffhausen. Freshwater Lake Constance is central Europes third largest, after Lake Balaton and it is 63 km long, and at its widest point, nearly 14 km. It covers approximately 571 km2, and is 395 m above sea level, the greatest depth is 252 metres in the middle of the eastern part. Its volume is approximately 10×10^9 m3, the regulated Rhine flows into the lake in the southeast, through the Obersee, the city of Konstanz and the Untersee, and flows out near Stein am Rhein. The lake itself is an important drinking water source for southwestern Germany, the culminating point of the lakes drainage basin is the Tödi at 3,614 metres above sea level. Car ferries link Romanshorn to Friedrichshafen, and Konstanz to Meersburg, Lake Constance was formed by the Rhine Glacier during the ice age and is a zungenbecken lake. The Rhine, the Bregenzer Ache, and the Dornbirner Ache carry sediments from the Alps to the lake, thus decreasing the depth. Lake Constance was first mentioned by the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela about 43 AD and he noted that the Rhine flows through two lakes, and gave them the Latin names Lacus Venetus and Lacus Acronius. Pliny the Elder used the name Lacus Brigantinus, after the Roman city of Brigantium, the lake is also colloquially known as the Swabian Sea. The lake was frozen in the years 1077,1326,1378,1435,1465,1477,1491,1517,1571,1573,1600,1684,1695,1709,1795,1830,1880, and 1963. Approximately 1,000 tonnes of fish were caught by 150 professional fishermen in 2001 which was below the ten year average of 1,200 tonnes per year. The Lake Constance trout was almost extinct in the 1980s due to pollution, Lake Constance is the home of the critically endangered species of trout Salvelinus profundus, and formerly also the now extinct Lake Constance whitefish. After the Council of Constance, the Latin-speaking Catholic world gave the lake its current international name and it was derived from the city of Konstanz, that, in turn, was named after a Roman emperor. The German name, Bodensee, derives from the town of Bodman, Lake Constance is the only area in Europe where no borders exist, because there is no legally binding agreement as to where the borders lie between Switzerland, Germany and Austria. Legal questions pertaining to transport and fishing are regulated in separate treaties. One concerns a houseboat which was moored in two states, another concerns the rights to fish in the Bay of Bregenz, in relation to the latter, an Austrian family was of the opinion that it alone had the right to fish in broad portions of the bay. However, this was accepted neither by the Austrian courts nor by the organs, a 100-year flood around June 1999 raised the level about 2 metres above normal, flooding harbors and many shoreline buildings and hotels
4.
Music
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Music is an art form and cultural activity whose medium is sound organized in time. The common elements of music are pitch, rhythm, dynamics, different styles or types of music may emphasize, de-emphasize or omit some of these elements. The word derives from Greek μουσική, Ancient Greek and Indian philosophers defined music as tones ordered horizontally as melodies and vertically as harmonies. Common sayings such as the harmony of the spheres and it is music to my ears point to the notion that music is often ordered and pleasant to listen to. However, 20th-century composer John Cage thought that any sound can be music, saying, for example, There is no noise, the creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context. There are many types of music, including music, traditional music, art music, music written for religious ceremonies. For example, it can be hard to draw the line between some early 1980s hard rock and heavy metal, within the arts, music may be classified as a performing art, a fine art or as an auditory art. People may make music as a hobby, like a teen playing cello in a youth orchestra, the word derives from Greek μουσική. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, the music is derived from mid-13c. Musike, from Old French musique and directly from Latin musica the art of music and this is derived from the. Greek mousike of the Muses, from fem. of mousikos pertaining to the Muses, from Mousa Muse. In classical Greece, any art in which the Muses presided, Music is composed and performed for many purposes, ranging from aesthetic pleasure, religious or ceremonial purposes, or as an entertainment product for the marketplace. With the advent of recording, records of popular songs. Some music lovers create mix tapes of their songs, which serve as a self-portrait. An environment consisting solely of what is most ardently loved, amateur musicians can compose or perform music for their own pleasure, and derive their income elsewhere. Professional musicians sometimes work as freelancers or session musicians, seeking contracts and engagements in a variety of settings, There are often many links between amateur and professional musicians. Beginning amateur musicians take lessons with professional musicians, in community settings, advanced amateur musicians perform with professional musicians in a variety of ensembles such as community concert bands and community orchestras. However, there are many cases where a live performance in front of an audience is also recorded and distributed. Live concert recordings are popular in classical music and in popular music forms such as rock, where illegally taped live concerts are prized by music lovers
5.
Geometry
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Geometry is a branch of mathematics concerned with questions of shape, size, relative position of figures, and the properties of space. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is called a geometer, Geometry arose independently in a number of early cultures as a practical way for dealing with lengths, areas, and volumes. Geometry began to see elements of mathematical science emerging in the West as early as the 6th century BC. By the 3rd century BC, geometry was put into a form by Euclid, whose treatment, Euclids Elements. Geometry arose independently in India, with texts providing rules for geometric constructions appearing as early as the 3rd century BC, islamic scientists preserved Greek ideas and expanded on them during the Middle Ages. By the early 17th century, geometry had been put on a solid footing by mathematicians such as René Descartes. Since then, and into modern times, geometry has expanded into non-Euclidean geometry and manifolds, while geometry has evolved significantly throughout the years, there are some general concepts that are more or less fundamental to geometry. These include the concepts of points, lines, planes, surfaces, angles, contemporary geometry has many subfields, Euclidean geometry is geometry in its classical sense. The mandatory educational curriculum of the majority of nations includes the study of points, lines, planes, angles, triangles, congruence, similarity, solid figures, circles, Euclidean geometry also has applications in computer science, crystallography, and various branches of modern mathematics. Differential geometry uses techniques of calculus and linear algebra to problems in geometry. It has applications in physics, including in general relativity, topology is the field concerned with the properties of geometric objects that are unchanged by continuous mappings. In practice, this often means dealing with large-scale properties of spaces, convex geometry investigates convex shapes in the Euclidean space and its more abstract analogues, often using techniques of real analysis. It has close connections to convex analysis, optimization and functional analysis, algebraic geometry studies geometry through the use of multivariate polynomials and other algebraic techniques. It has applications in areas, including cryptography and string theory. Discrete geometry is concerned mainly with questions of relative position of simple objects, such as points. It shares many methods and principles with combinatorics, Geometry has applications to many fields, including art, architecture, physics, as well as to other branches of mathematics. The earliest recorded beginnings of geometry can be traced to ancient Mesopotamia, the earliest known texts on geometry are the Egyptian Rhind Papyrus and Moscow Papyrus, the Babylonian clay tablets such as Plimpton 322. For example, the Moscow Papyrus gives a formula for calculating the volume of a truncated pyramid, later clay tablets demonstrate that Babylonian astronomers implemented trapezoid procedures for computing Jupiters position and motion within time-velocity space
6.
Astronomy
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Astronomy is a natural science that studies celestial objects and phenomena. It applies mathematics, physics, and chemistry, in an effort to explain the origin of those objects and phenomena and their evolution. Objects of interest include planets, moons, stars, galaxies, and comets, while the phenomena include supernovae explosions, gamma ray bursts, more generally, all astronomical phenomena that originate outside Earths atmosphere are within the purview of astronomy. A related but distinct subject, physical cosmology, is concerned with the study of the Universe as a whole, Astronomy is the oldest of the natural sciences. The early civilizations in recorded history, such as the Babylonians, Greeks, Indians, Egyptians, Nubians, Iranians, Chinese, during the 20th century, the field of professional astronomy split into observational and theoretical branches. Observational astronomy is focused on acquiring data from observations of astronomical objects, theoretical astronomy is oriented toward the development of computer or analytical models to describe astronomical objects and phenomena. The two fields complement each other, with theoretical astronomy seeking to explain the results and observations being used to confirm theoretical results. Astronomy is one of the few sciences where amateurs can play an active role, especially in the discovery. Amateur astronomers have made and contributed to many important astronomical discoveries, Astronomy means law of the stars. Astronomy should not be confused with astrology, the system which claims that human affairs are correlated with the positions of celestial objects. Although the two share a common origin, they are now entirely distinct. Generally, either the term astronomy or astrophysics may be used to refer to this subject, however, since most modern astronomical research deals with subjects related to physics, modern astronomy could actually be called astrophysics. Few fields, such as astrometry, are purely astronomy rather than also astrophysics, some titles of the leading scientific journals in this field includeThe Astronomical Journal, The Astrophysical Journal and Astronomy and Astrophysics. In early times, astronomy only comprised the observation and predictions of the motions of objects visible to the naked eye, in some locations, early cultures assembled massive artifacts that possibly had some astronomical purpose. Before tools such as the telescope were invented, early study of the stars was conducted using the naked eye, most of early astronomy actually consisted of mapping the positions of the stars and planets, a science now referred to as astrometry. From these observations, early ideas about the motions of the planets were formed, and the nature of the Sun, Moon, the Earth was believed to be the center of the Universe with the Sun, the Moon and the stars rotating around it. This is known as the model of the Universe, or the Ptolemaic system. The Babylonians discovered that lunar eclipses recurred in a cycle known as a saros
7.
Astrolabe
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An astrolabe is an elaborate inclinometer, historically used by astronomers and navigators, to measure the inclined position in the sky of a celestial body, day or night. It can thus be used to identify stars or planets, to determine local latitude given local time and vice versa, to survey and it was used in classical antiquity, the Islamic Golden Age, the European Middle Ages and the Renaissance for all these purposes. While the astrolabe is effective for determining latitude on land or calm seas, the mariners astrolabe was developed to solve that problem. OED gives the translation star-taker for the English word astrolabe and traces it, through medieval Latin, to the Greek word astrolabos from astron star, in the medieval Islamic world the word asturlab was given various etymologies. In Arabic texts, the word is translated as akhdh al-kawakib which corresponds to an interpretation of the Greek word, al-Biruni quotes and criticizes the medieval scientist Hamzah al-Isfahani who had stated, asturlab is an arabization of this Persian phrase. In medieval Islamic sources, there is also a fictional and popular etymology of the words as lines of lab, in this popular etymology, Lab is a certain son of Idris. This etymology is mentioned by a 10th-century scientist named al-Qummi but rejected by al-Khwarizmi, Lab in Arabic also means sun and black stony places. An early astrolabe was invented in the Hellenistic world by Apollonius of Perga, a marriage of the planisphere and dioptra, the astrolabe was effectively an analog calculator capable of working out several different kinds of problems in spherical astronomy. Theon of Alexandria wrote a treatise on the astrolabe. Some historians attribute the invention to Hypatia, the daughter of Theon of Alexandria, noting that Synesius. Astrolabes continued in use in the Greek-speaking world throughout the Byzantine period, about 550 AD the Christian philosopher John Philoponus wrote a treatise on the astrolabe in Greek, which is the earliest extant Greek treatise on the instrument. In addition, Severus Sebokht, a bishop who lived in Mesopotamia, Astrolabes were further developed in the medieval Islamic world, where Muslim astronomers introduced angular scales to the astrolabe, adding circles indicating azimuths on the horizon. It was widely used throughout the Muslim world, chiefly as an aid to navigation and as a way of finding the Qibla, the first person credited with building the astrolabe in the Islamic world is reportedly the 8th-century mathematician Muhammad al-Fazari. The mathematical background was established by the Muslim astronomer Albatenius in his treatise Kitab az-Zij, the earliest surviving dated astrolabe is dated AH315. In the Islamic world, astrolabes were used to find the times of sunrise and the rising of fixed stars, to help schedule morning prayers. In the 10th century, al-Sufi first described over 1,000 different uses of an astrolabe, in areas as diverse as astronomy, astrology, navigation, surveying, timekeeping, prayer, Salat, Qibla, etc. The spherical astrolabe, a variation of both the astrolabe and the sphere, was invented during the Middle Ages by astronomers and inventors in the Islamic world. The earliest description of the spherical astrolabe dates back to Al-Nayrizi, in the 12th century, Sharaf al-Dīn al-Tūsī invented the linear astrolabe, sometimes called the staff of al-Tusi, which was a simple wooden rod with graduated markings but without sights
8.
Nativity of Jesus
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The nativity of Jesus or birth of Jesus is described in the gospels of Luke and Matthew. The two accounts agree that Jesus was born in Bethlehem in the time of Herod the Great to a virgin whose name was Mary. In Christian theology the nativity marks the incarnation of Jesus as the second Adam, in fulfillment of the divine will of God, undoing the damage caused by the fall of the first man, Adam. The artistic depiction of the nativity has been an important subject for Christian artists since the 4th century, the nativity plays a major role in the Christian liturgical year. Christian congregations of the Western tradition begin observing the season of Advent four Sundays before Christmas, the traditional feast-day of his birth, which falls on December 25. The date of birth for Jesus of Nazareth is not stated in the gospels or in any secular text, the Gospels of both Matthew and Luke place the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. However, Luke 1, 26–27 clearly states that Mary lived in Nazareth before the birth of Jesus, at the time of the Annunciation. The Gospel of Luke states that Mary gave birth to Jesus and placed him in a manger “because there was no place for them in the inn, but does not say exactly where Jesus was born. This could be a place to keep the sheep within the Bethlehem area, in the 2nd century, Justin Martyr stated that Jesus had been born in a cave outside the town, while the Protoevangelium of James described a legendary birth in a cave nearby. In Contra Celsum 1.51, Origen, who from around 215 travelled throughout Palestine, the Quranic birth of Jesus, like the Gospels, places the virgin birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was betrothed to Joseph, but was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit. Joseph intended to divorce her quietly, but an angel told him in a dream that he should take Mary as his wife and name the child Jesus, Joseph awoke and did all that the angel commanded. Chapter 1 of Matthews Gospel recounts Jesus birth and naming and the beginning of chapter 2 reveals that Jesus was born in Bethlehem during the time of Herod the Great. Magi from the east came to Herod and asked him where they would find the King of the Jews, advised by the chief priests and teachers, Herod sent the Magi to Bethlehem, where they worshiped the child and gave him gifts. When they had departed an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream and warned him to take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt, for Herod intended to kill him. The Holy Family remained in Egypt until Herod died, when Joseph took them to Nazareth in Galilee for fear of Herods son who now ruled in Jerusalem, so was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene. When the time of the birth drew near the Roman Emperor commanded a census of all the world, and Joseph took Mary to Bethlehem, the city of David, as he was of the House of David. In accordance with the Jewish law his parents presented the infant Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem, Joseph and Mary then returned to Nazareth
9.
Monastery
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A monastery is a building or complex of buildings comprising the domestic quarters and workplaces of monastics, monks or nuns, whether living in communities or alone. A monastery generally includes a place reserved for prayer which may be a chapel, church or temple, a monastery complex typically comprises a number of buildings which include a church, dormitory, cloister, refectory, library, balneary and infirmary. These may include a hospice, a school and a range of agricultural and manufacturing such as a barn. In English usage, the monastery is generally used to denote the buildings of a community of monks. In modern usage, convent tends to be applied only to institutions of female monastics, historically, a convent denoted a house of friars, now more commonly called a friary. Various religions may apply these terms in specific ways. The earliest extant use of the term monastērion is by the 1st century AD Jewish philosopher Philo in On The Contemplative Life, in England the word monastery was also applied to the habitation of a bishop and the cathedral clergy who lived apart from the lay community. Most cathedrals were not monasteries, and were served by canons secular, however, some were run by monasteries orders, such as York Minster. Westminster Abbey was for a time a cathedral, and was a Benedictine monastery until the Reformation. They are also to be distinguished from collegiate churches, such as St Georges Chapel, in most of this article, the term monastery is used generically to refer to any of a number of types of religious community. In the Roman Catholic religion and to some extent in certain branches of Buddhism, there is a more specific definition of the term. Buddhist monasteries are generally called vihara, viharas may be occupied by males or females, and in keeping with common English usage, a vihara populated by females may often be called a nunnery or a convent. However, vihara can also refer to a temple, in Tibetan Buddhism, monasteries are often called gompa. In Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, a monastery is called a wat, in Burma, a monastery is called a kyaung. A Christian monastery may be an abbey, or a priory and it may be a community of men or of women. A charterhouse is any monastery belonging to the Carthusian order, in Eastern Christianity, a very small monastic community can be called a skete, and a very large or important monastery can be given the dignity of a lavra. The great communal life of a Christian monastery is called cenobitic, as opposed to the life of an anchorite. In Hinduism monasteries are called matha, mandir, koil, or most commonly an ashram, jains use the Buddhist term vihara
10.
Literacy
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Literacy is traditionally understood as the ability to read, write, and use arithmetic. The concept of literacy is expanding in OECD countries to include skills to access knowledge through technology and ability to assess complex contexts. A person who travels and resides in a country but is unable to read or write in the language of the host country would also be regarded by the locals as being illiterate. The key to literacy is reading development, a progression of skills that begins with the ability to understand words and decode written words. The inability to do so is called illiteracy or analphabetism, Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society. Literacy is thought to have first emerged with the development of numeracy, script developed independently at least four times in human history in Mesopotamia, Egypt, lowland Mesoamerica, and China. The earliest forms of written communication originated in Sumer, located in southern Mesopotamia about 3500-3000 BCE, writing systems in Mesopotamia first emerged from a recording system in which people used impressed token markings to manage trade and agricultural production. The token system served as a precursor to early cuneiform writing once people began recording information on clay tablets, proto-cuneiform texts exhibit not only numerical signs, but also ideograms depicting objects being counted. Egyptian hieroglyphs emerged from 3300-3100 BCE and depicted royal iconography that emphasized power amongst other elites, the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system was the first notation system to have phonetic values. Writing in lowland Mesoamerica was first put into practice by the Olmec and Zapotec civilizations in 900-400 BCE and these civilizations used glyphic writing and bar-and-dot numerical notation systems for purposes related to royal iconography and calendar systems. The earliest written notations in China date back to the Shang Dynasty in 1200 BCE and these systematic notations were found inscribed on bones and recorded sacrifices made, tributes received, and animals hunted, which were activities of the elite. These oracle-bone inscriptions were the ancestors of modern Chinese script and contained logosyllabic script. According to social anthropologist Jack Goody, there are two interpretations that regard the origin of the alphabet, many classical scholars, such as historian Ignace Gelb, credit the Ancient Greeks for creating the first alphabetic system that used distinctive signs for consonants and vowels. Thus, many argue that the ancient Semitic-speaking peoples of northern Canaan invented the consonantal alphabet as early as 1500 BCE. Much of this development is credited to English archeologist Flinders Petrie. Ten years later, English Egyptologist Alan Gardiner reasoned that these contain an alphabet. In 1948, William F. Albright deciphered the text using additional evidence that had been discovered subsequent to Goodys findings and this included a series of inscriptions from Ugarit, discovered in 1929 by French archaeologist Claude F. A. Schaeffer. Some of these inscriptions were mythological texts that consisted of a 32-letter cuneiform consonantal alphabet, another significant discovery was made in 1953 when three arrowheads were uncovered, each containing identical Canaanite inscriptions from twelfth century BCE
11.
Mathematics
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Mathematics is the study of topics such as quantity, structure, space, and change. There is a range of views among mathematicians and philosophers as to the exact scope, Mathematicians seek out patterns and use them to formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proof, when mathematical structures are good models of real phenomena, then mathematical reasoning can provide insight or predictions about nature. Through the use of abstraction and logic, mathematics developed from counting, calculation, measurement, practical mathematics has been a human activity from as far back as written records exist. The research required to solve mathematical problems can take years or even centuries of sustained inquiry, rigorous arguments first appeared in Greek mathematics, most notably in Euclids Elements. Galileo Galilei said, The universe cannot be read until we have learned the language and it is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word. Without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth, carl Friedrich Gauss referred to mathematics as the Queen of the Sciences. Benjamin Peirce called mathematics the science that draws necessary conclusions, David Hilbert said of mathematics, We are not speaking here of arbitrariness in any sense. Mathematics is not like a game whose tasks are determined by arbitrarily stipulated rules, rather, it is a conceptual system possessing internal necessity that can only be so and by no means otherwise. Albert Einstein stated that as far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, Mathematics is essential in many fields, including natural science, engineering, medicine, finance and the social sciences. Applied mathematics has led to entirely new mathematical disciplines, such as statistics, Mathematicians also engage in pure mathematics, or mathematics for its own sake, without having any application in mind. There is no clear line separating pure and applied mathematics, the history of mathematics can be seen as an ever-increasing series of abstractions. The earliest uses of mathematics were in trading, land measurement, painting and weaving patterns, in Babylonian mathematics elementary arithmetic first appears in the archaeological record. Numeracy pre-dated writing and numeral systems have many and diverse. Between 600 and 300 BC the Ancient Greeks began a study of mathematics in its own right with Greek mathematics. Mathematics has since been extended, and there has been a fruitful interaction between mathematics and science, to the benefit of both. Mathematical discoveries continue to be made today, the overwhelming majority of works in this ocean contain new mathematical theorems and their proofs. The word máthēma is derived from μανθάνω, while the modern Greek equivalent is μαθαίνω, in Greece, the word for mathematics came to have the narrower and more technical meaning mathematical study even in Classical times
12.
Christianity
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Christianity is a Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, who serves as the focal point for the religion. It is the worlds largest religion, with over 2.4 billion followers, or 33% of the global population, Christians believe that Jesus is the Son of God and the savior of humanity whose coming as the Messiah was prophesied in the Old Testament. Christian theology is summarized in creeds such as the Apostles Creed and his incarnation, earthly ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection are often referred to as the gospel, meaning good news. The term gospel also refers to accounts of Jesuss life and teaching, four of which—Matthew, Mark, Luke. Christianity is an Abrahamic religion that began as a Second Temple Judaic sect in the mid-1st century, following the Age of Discovery, Christianity spread to the Americas, Australasia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the rest of the world through missionary work and colonization. Christianity has played a prominent role in the shaping of Western civilization, throughout its history, Christianity has weathered schisms and theological disputes that have resulted in many distinct churches and denominations. Worldwide, the three largest branches of Christianity are the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the denominations of Protestantism. There are many important differences of interpretation and opinion of the Bible, concise doctrinal statements or confessions of religious beliefs are known as creeds. They began as baptismal formulae and were expanded during the Christological controversies of the 4th and 5th centuries to become statements of faith. Many evangelical Protestants reject creeds as definitive statements of faith, even agreeing with some or all of the substance of the creeds. The Baptists have been non-creedal in that they have not sought to establish binding authoritative confessions of faith on one another. Also rejecting creeds are groups with roots in the Restoration Movement, such as the Christian Church, the Evangelical Christian Church in Canada, the Apostles Creed is the most widely accepted statement of the articles of Christian faith. It is also used by Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists and this particular creed was developed between the 2nd and 9th centuries. Its central doctrines are those of the Trinity and God the Creator, each of the doctrines found in this creed can be traced to statements current in the apostolic period. The creed was used as a summary of Christian doctrine for baptismal candidates in the churches of Rome. Most Christians accept the use of creeds, and subscribe to at least one of the mentioned above. The central tenet of Christianity is the belief in Jesus as the Son of God, Christians believe that Jesus, as the Messiah, was anointed by God as savior of humanity, and hold that Jesus coming was the fulfillment of messianic prophecies of the Old Testament. The Christian concept of the Messiah differs significantly from the contemporary Jewish concept, Jesus, having become fully human, suffered the pains and temptations of a mortal man, but did not sin
