Adriaan van Wijngaarden
Adriaan "Aad" van Wijngaarden was a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist, considered by many to have been the founding father of informatica in the Netherlands. Though he was trained as an engineer, Van Wijngaarden would emphasize and promote the mathematical aspects of computing, first in numerical analysis in programming languages and in design principles of programming languages, his education was in mechanical engineering, for which he received a degree from Delft University of Technology in 1939. He studied for a doctorate in hydrodynamics, but abandoned the area, he joined the Nationaal Luchtvaartlaboratorium in 1945 and went with a group to England the following year to learn about new technologies, developed there during World War II. Van Wijngaarden was intrigued by the new idea of automatic computing, on 1 January 1947 he became the head of the Computing Department of the brand-new Mathematisch Centrum in Amsterdam, he made further visits to England and the United States, gathering ideas for the construction of the first Dutch computer, the ARRA, an electromechanical construction first demonstrated in 1952.
In that same year, Van Wijngaarden hired Edsger Dijkstra, they worked on software for the ARRA. While visiting Edinburgh in 1958, Van Wijngaarden was injured in an automobile accident in which his wife was killed. After he recovered, he focused more on programming language research, was one of the designers of the original ALGOL, ALGOL 68, for which he developed a two-level type of grammar that became known as Van Wijngaarden grammars, he became the director of the MC in 1961, remained in that post for the next twenty years. In 1959 he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. Awarded every 5 years from the 60th anniversary of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in 2006. Consists of a bronze sculpture. 2006: Computer scientist Nancy Lynch and mathematician-magician Persi Diaconis. 2011: Computer scientist Éva Tardos and numerical mathematician John C. Butcher. 2016: Computer scientist Xavier Leroy and statistician Sara van de Geer. List of pioneers in computer science Adriaan van Wijngaarden at DBLP Bibliography Server IFIP 36 years Obituaries: Prof. Adriaan van WIJNGAARDEN Rekenmeisjes en rekentuig door Gerard Alberts.
Pythagoras. Adriaan van Wijngaarden. Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederlandse Wiskundigen. Aad van Wijngaarden’s 100th Birthday
City College of New York
The City College of the City University of New York is a public senior college of the City University of New York in New York City. Located in Hamilton Heights overlooking Harlem in Manhattan, City College's 35-acre Collegiate Gothic campus spans Convent Avenue from 130th to 141st Streets, it was designed by renowned architect George B. Post, many of its buildings have achieved landmark status. Affectionately known as "the Harvard of the proletariat," the college has graduated ten Nobel Prize winners, one Fields Medalist, one Turing Award winner, three Pulitzer Prizes winners, 3 Rhodes Scholars. Among these alumni, the latest is John O'Keefe. Founded in 1847, City College was the first free public institution of higher education in the United States, it is the oldest of CUNY's 24 institutions of higher learning, is considered its flagship college. Other primacies at City College that helped shape the culture of American higher education include the first student government in the nation; the City College of New York was founded as the Free Academy of the City of New York in 1847 by wealthy businessman and president of the Board of Education Townsend Harris.
A combination prep school, high school / secondary school and college, it would provide children of immigrants and the poor access to free higher education based on academic merit alone. It was one of the early public high schools in America following earlier similar institutions being founded in Boston and Baltimore; the Free Academy was the first of what would become a system of municipally-supported colleges – the second, Hunter College, was founded as a women's institution in 1870. In 1847, New York State Governor John Young had given permission to the state Board of Education to found the Free Academy, ratified in a statewide referendum. Founder Townsend Harris proclaimed, "Open the doors to all… Let the children of the rich and the poor take their seats together and know of no distinction save that of industry, good conduct and intellect." Dr. Horace Webster, a United States Military Academy at West Point graduate, was the first president of the Free Academy. On the occasion of The Free Academy's formal opening, January 21, 1849, Webster said: The experiment is to be tried, whether the children of the people, the children of the whole people, can be educated.
In 1847, a curriculum was adopted which had nine main fields: mathematics, language, drawing, natural philosophy, experimental philosophy and political economy. The Academy's first graduation took place in 1853 in Niblo's Garden Theatre, a large theater and opera house on Broadway, near Houston Street at the corner of Broadway and Prince Street. In its early years, the Free Academy showed tolerance for diversity in comparison to its urban neighbor, Columbia College, exclusive to the sons of wealthy families; the Free Academy had a framework of tolerance that extended beyond the admission of students from every social stratum. In 1854, Columbia's trustees denied distinguished chemist and scientist Oliver Wolcott Gibbs a faculty position because of Gibbs's Unitarian religious beliefs. Gibbs was a professor and held an appointment at the Free Academy since 1848. In the history of CCNY, in the early 1900s, President John H. Finley gave the College a more secular orientation by abolishing mandatory chapel attendance.
This change occurred at a time. In 1866, the Free Academy, a men's institution, was renamed the "College of the City of New York". In 1929, the College of the City of New York became the "City College of New York"; the institution became known as the "City College of the City University of New York" when the CUNY was formally established as the umbrella institution for New York City's municipal-college system in 1961. The names City College of New York and City College, remain in general use. With the name change in 1866, lavender was chosen as the College's color. In 1867, the academic senate, the first student government in the nation, was formed. Having struggled over the issue for ten years, in 1895, the New York state Legislature voted to let the City College build a new campus. A four-square block site was chosen, located in Manhattanville, within the area, enclosed by the North Campus Arches. Like President Webster, the second president of the newly renamed City College was a West Point graduate.
The second president, General Alexander S. Webb, assumed office in 1869, serving for the next three decades. One of the Union Army's heroes at Gettysburg, General Webb was the commander of the Phi
Coin flipping
Coin flipping, coin tossing, or heads or tails is the practice of throwing a coin in the air and checking which side is showing when it lands, in order to choose between two alternatives, sometimes used to resolve a dispute between two parties. It is a form of sortition; the party who calls the side wins. The historical origin of coin flipping is the interpretation of a chance outcome as the expression of divine will. Coin flipping was known to the ancient Chinese as 撒大苏打, as some coins had a ship on one side and the head of the emperor on the other. In England, this was referred to as pile; the expression Heads or Tails results from heads and tails being considered complementary body parts. During a coin toss, the coin is thrown into the air such that it rotates edge-over-edge several times. Either beforehand or when the coin is in the air, an interested party calls "heads" or "tails", indicating which side of the coin that party is choosing; the other party is assigned the opposite side. Depending on custom, the coin may be caught.
When the coin comes to rest, the toss is complete and the party who called or was assigned the upper side is declared the winner. It is possible for a coin to land on its edge by landing up against an object or by getting stuck in the ground; however on a flat surface it is possible for a coin to land on its edge, with a chance of about 1 in 6000 for an American nickel. Angular momentum prevents most coins from landing on their edges unsupported if flipped; such cases in which a coin does land on its edge are exceptionally rare and in most cases the coin is re-flipped. The coin may be any type. Larger coins tend to be more popular than smaller ones; some high-profile coin tosses, such as the Cricket World Cup and the Super Bowl, use custom-made ceremonial medallions. Three-way coin flips are possible, by a different process – this can be done either to choose two out of three, or to choose one out of three. To choose two out of three, three coins are flipped, if two coins come up the same and one different, the different one loses, leaving two players.
To choose one out of three, either reverse this, or add a regular two-way coin flip between the remaining players as a second step. Note that the three-way flip is 75% to work each time it is tried, does not require that "heads" or "tails" be called. A famous example of such a three-way coin flip is dramatized in Friday Night Lights, three high school football teams use a three-way coin flip. A legacy of this coin flip was to reduce the use of coin flips to break ties in Texas sports, instead using point-systems to reduce the frequency of ties. Coin tossing is a simple and unbiased way of settling a dispute or deciding between two or more arbitrary options. In a game theoretic analysis it provides odds to both sides involved, requiring little effort and preventing the dispute from escalating into a struggle, it is used in sports and other games to decide arbitrary factors such as which side of the field a team will play from, or which side will attack or defend initially. Factors such as wind direction, the position of the sun, other conditions may affect the decision.
In team sports it is the captain who makes the call, while the umpire or referee oversees such proceedings. A competitive method may be used instead of a toss in some situations, for example in basketball the jump ball is employed, while the face-off plays a similar role in ice hockey. Coin flipping is used to decide which end of the field the teams will play to and/or which team gets first use of the ball, or similar questions in football matches, American football games, Australian rules football and other sports requiring such decisions. In the U. S. a specially minted coin is flipped in National Football League games. The XFL, a short-lived American football league, attempted to avoid coin tosses by implementing a face-off style "opening scramble," in which one player from each team tried to recover a loose football; because of the high rate of injury in these events, it has not achieved mainstream popularity in any football league, coin tossing remains the method of choice in American football.
In an association football match, the team winning the coin toss chooses which goal to attack in the first half. For the second half, the teams switch ends, the team that won the coin toss kicks off. Coin tosses are used to decide which team has the pick of going first or second in a penalty shoot-out. Before the early-1970s introduction of the penalty shootout, coin tosses were needed to decide the outcome of tied matches; the most famous instance of this was the semifinal game of the 1968 European Championship in Italy between Italy and the Soviet Union, which finished 0-0 after extra time. Italy won, went on to become European champions. In cricket the toss is significant, as the decision whether to
Dai Vernon
Dai Vernon, a.k.a. The Professor, was a Canadian magician, his expert sleight of hand technique and extensive knowledge with card tricks and close-up magic, garnered him respect among fellow magicians. His influence was considerable in the magic world of the 20th Century, he was a mentor to numerous famous magicians, he lived out his last years at a nightclub in Hollywood, California. Vernon was born in Ottawa as David Frederick Wingfield Verner. While performing, he mentioned that he had learned his first trick from his father at age seven, adding wryly that he had "wasted the first 6 years" of his life, his father was an amateur magician. Vernon studied mechanical engineering at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, but by World War I he had moved to New York City. Vernon first fell in love with magic when he was seven years old after his father took him to see a magic show; the first real magic book he owned was an early edition of the most famous card book of them all, The Expert at the Card Table, by S. W. Erdnase.
By the time he was 13. He had a famous encounter with another up-and-coming young magician from his town, Cliff Green, who asked Vernon, "What kind of magic do you do?" Vernon responded by asking the boy to name a card. Upon pulling a pack of cards from his pocket, Vernon turned over the top card of the deck to reveal the named card and replied to the speechless Green "That's the kind of magic I do. What kind of magic do you do?" As a young man, Vernon moved to New York where, in the back room of Clyde Powers' magic shop, he found favor among many of the great magicians of the era, including Dr. James William Elliott and Harry Kellar, he began to use the first name "Dai" after a newspaper used the name in place of "David". When Verner first moved to the United States, the male member of a popular ice-skating pair had the surname Vernon. Owing to his extraordinary knowledge of, skill at, sleight of hand, Vernon has long been affectionately known as The Professor. Harry Houdini boasted that if he saw a card trick performed three times in a row he would be able to figure it out.
Vernon showed Houdini a trick where he removed the top card of the deck and placed it second from the top turned over the top card to again reveal the original card. Houdini watched Vernon do the trick seven times, each time insisting that Vernon "do it again." Houdini's wife and Vernon's friends said, "Face it, you're fooled." For years afterward, Vernon used the title The Man. Though respected by professional magicians nationwide due in part to publicity via the magazine The Sphinx, Vernon was a gifted amateur until his 40s. Before the Magic Castle, Vernon never held a steady full-time job for more than a few months, he performed magic at nightclubs or on cruise ships to South America and back, toured the Philippines as an entertainer during WW2 with the United Service Organizations. His engineering degree was put to use as a sometime blueprint reader. However, Vernon's main source of income was cutting custom silhouette portraits, a talent that paid 25 to 50 cents per silhouette for about two minutes work during the 1920s and'30s.
A few hours a week cutting silhouettes was enough to support his family and finance his sleight of hand hobby. Vernon spent most of his early life traveling all over the United States of America looking for card cheats, anyone who might know anything about sleight-of-hand with cards, he was famously under-credited for much of the work published in Jean Hugard and Frederick Braue's Expert Card Technique, though a edition included an extra chapter which acknowledges Vernon's contributions. In fact, a huge portion of the sleight-of-hand had been discovered by Vernon over years of searching. Among magicians, he is credited with inventing or improving many standard close-up effects with cards and other small items; the "standard" Cups and balls routine is his, his 6-ring "Symphony of the Rings" remains one of the most popular Chinese linking rings routines in use to this day. Vernon spent the last thirty years of his life as Magician-in-Residence and star attraction at The Magic Castle in Los Angeles, California.
There he mentored numerous well-known magicians including Ricky Jay, Persi Diaconis, Doug Henning, Larry Jennings, Bruce Cervon, Michael Ammar and John Carney. In 1924, Vernon married a diminutive magician's assistant, they would have two sons and Derek. Jeanne tired of Dai's wanderlust, spendthrift money habits, obsession with card tricks, the couple lived separately by the 1950s, they never formally divorced. He died on August 1992, in Ramona, County of San Diego, California, he was cremated, his ashes are interred at the Magic Castle. Dai Vernon's Book of Magic Inner Secrets of Card Magic More Inner Secrets of Card Magic Further Inner Secrets of Card Magic Ultimate Secrets of Card Magic Dai Vernon's Tribute to Nate Leipzig Malini & His Magic The Essential Dai Vernon The Symphony of the Rings Early Vernon Dai Vernon's Revelations Vernon Touch In November 2005, Karl Johnson wrote The Magician And The Cards
Mathematics
Mathematics includes the study of such topics as quantity, structure and change. Mathematicians use patterns to formulate new conjectures; when mathematical structures are good models of real phenomena mathematical reasoning can provide insight or predictions about nature. Through the use of abstraction and logic, mathematics developed from counting, calculation and the systematic study of the shapes and motions of physical objects. Practical mathematics has been a human activity from as far back; the research required to solve mathematical problems can take years or centuries of sustained inquiry. Rigorous arguments first appeared in Greek mathematics, most notably in Euclid's Elements. Since the pioneering work of Giuseppe Peano, David Hilbert, others on axiomatic systems in the late 19th century, it has become customary to view mathematical research as establishing truth by rigorous deduction from appropriately chosen axioms and definitions. Mathematics developed at a slow pace until the Renaissance, when mathematical innovations interacting with new scientific discoveries led to a rapid increase in the rate of mathematical discovery that has continued to the present day.
Mathematics is essential in many fields, including natural science, medicine and the social sciences. Applied mathematics has led to new mathematical disciplines, such as statistics and game theory. Mathematicians engage in pure mathematics without having any application in mind, but practical applications for what began as pure mathematics are discovered later; the history of mathematics can be seen as an ever-increasing series of abstractions. The first abstraction, shared by many animals, was that of numbers: the realization that a collection of two apples and a collection of two oranges have something in common, namely quantity of their members; as evidenced by tallies found on bone, in addition to recognizing how to count physical objects, prehistoric peoples may have recognized how to count abstract quantities, like time – days, years. Evidence for more complex mathematics does not appear until around 3000 BC, when the Babylonians and Egyptians began using arithmetic and geometry for taxation and other financial calculations, for building and construction, for astronomy.
The most ancient mathematical texts from Mesopotamia and Egypt are from 2000–1800 BC. Many early texts mention Pythagorean triples and so, by inference, the Pythagorean theorem seems to be the most ancient and widespread mathematical development after basic arithmetic and geometry, it is in Babylonian mathematics that elementary arithmetic first appear in the archaeological record. The Babylonians possessed a place-value system, used a sexagesimal numeral system, still in use today for measuring angles and time. Beginning in the 6th century BC with the Pythagoreans, the Ancient Greeks began a systematic study of mathematics as a subject in its own right with Greek mathematics. Around 300 BC, Euclid introduced the axiomatic method still used in mathematics today, consisting of definition, axiom and proof, his textbook Elements is considered the most successful and influential textbook of all time. The greatest mathematician of antiquity is held to be Archimedes of Syracuse, he developed formulas for calculating the surface area and volume of solids of revolution and used the method of exhaustion to calculate the area under the arc of a parabola with the summation of an infinite series, in a manner not too dissimilar from modern calculus.
Other notable achievements of Greek mathematics are conic sections, trigonometry (Hipparchus of Nicaea, the beginnings of algebra. The Hindu–Arabic numeral system and the rules for the use of its operations, in use throughout the world today, evolved over the course of the first millennium AD in India and were transmitted to the Western world via Islamic mathematics. Other notable developments of Indian mathematics include the modern definition of sine and cosine, an early form of infinite series. During the Golden Age of Islam during the 9th and 10th centuries, mathematics saw many important innovations building on Greek mathematics; the most notable achievement of Islamic mathematics was the development of algebra. Other notable achievements of the Islamic period are advances in spherical trigonometry and the addition of the decimal point to the Arabic numeral system. Many notable mathematicians from this period were Persian, such as Al-Khwarismi, Omar Khayyam and Sharaf al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī. During the early modern period, mathematics began to develop at an accelerating pace in Western Europe.
The development of calculus by Newton and Leibniz in the 17th century revolutionized mathematics. Leonhard Euler was the most notable mathematician of the 18th century, contributing numerous theorems and discoveries; the foremost mathematician of the 19th century was the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who made numerous contributions to fields such as algebra, differential geometry, matrix theory, number theory, statistics. In the early 20th century, Kurt Gödel transformed mathematics by publishing his incompleteness theorems, which show that any axiomatic system, consistent will contain unprovable propositions. Mathematics has since been extended, there has been a fruitful interaction between mathematics and science, to
Sleight of hand
Sleight of hand refers to fine motor skills when used by performing artists in different art forms to entertain or manipulate. It is associated with close-up magic, card magic, card flourishing and stealing; because of its heavy use and practice by magicians, sleight of hand is confused as a branch of magic, but is in reality a separate genre of entertainment, as many artists practice sleight of hand without the slightest interest in magic. Sleight of hand pioneers with worldwide acclaim include Dan and Dave, Ricky Jay, David Copperfield, Yann Frisch, Norbert Ferré, Dai Vernon and Tony Slydini; the word sleight, meaning "the use of dexterity or cunning so as to deceive", comes from the Old Norse. The phrase sleight of hand means "quick fingers" or "trickster fingers". Common synonyms of Latin and French include legerdemain respectively. Seneca the Younger, philosopher of the Silver Age of Latin literature, famously compared rhetorical techniques and illusionist techniques. Sleight of hand is used in close-up magic, where the sleights are performed with the audience close to the magician in physical contact or within 3 to 4 m.
This close contact eliminate the use of gimmicks. It makes use of everyday items as props, such as cards, rubber bands, paper and saltshakers. A well-performed sleight looks like an ordinary and innocent gesture, change in hand-position or body posture. In addition to manual dexterity, sleight of hand in close-up magic depends on the use of psychology, timing and natural choreography in accomplishing a magical effect. Sleight of hand during stage magic performances is not common, as most magic events and stunts are performed with objects visible to a much larger audience, but is done by many stage performers; the most common magic tricks performed with sleight of hand on stage are rope manipulations and card tricks, with the first being done with a member of the audience to rule out the possibility of stooges and the latter being done on a table while a camera is live-recording, allowing the rest of audience to see the performance on a big screen. Worldwide acclaimed stage magician David Copperfield includes illusions featuring sleight of hand in his stage shows.
Although being used for entertainment and comedy purposes, sleight of hand is notoriously used to cheat at casinos and gambling facilities throughout the world. Common ways to professionally cheat at card games using sleight of hand include palming, switching and stealing cards from the table; such techniques involve extreme misdirection and years of practice. For these reasons, the term sleight of hand carries negative associations of dishonesty and deceit at many gambling halls, many magicians known around the world are publicly banned from casinos, such as British mentalist and close-up magician Derren Brown, banned from every casino in Britain. Unlike card tricks done on the streets or on stage and card cheating, cardistry is about impressing without illusions, deceit and other elements used in card tricks and card cheating. Cardistry, or card flourishes, are always intended to be visually impressive and appear difficult to perform. Card flourishing is associated with card tricks, but many sleight of hand artists perform flourishing without considering themselves magicians or having any real interest in card tricks.
The art of card throwing consist of throwing standard playing cards with excessively high speed and accuracy, powerful enough to slice fruits like carrots and melons. Like flourishing, throwing cards are meant to be visibly impressive and does not include magic elements. Magician Ricky Jay popularized throwing cards within the sleight of hand industry with the release of his 1977 book entitled Cards as Weapons, met with large sales and critical acclaim; some magic tricks, both close-up and on stage, are connected to throwing cards. Cups and Balls Invisible Turnover Pass Tenkai palm Henry, Hay. Cyclopedia of Magic. Dover Publications. ISBN 978-0-486-21808-3. Hugard, Jean; the Royal Road to Card Magic. Courier Corporation. ISBN 978-0486156682. Jones, Jessica; the Art of Cheating: A Nasty Little Book for Tricky Little Schemers and Their Helpless Victims. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1416571384. Jay, Joshua. Magic: The Complete Course. Workman Publishing. ISBN 978-0761159681. Longe, Robert. Clever Close-up Magic.
Sterling Publishing Company. ISBN 978-1402700279. Ostovich, Helen. Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage. Ashgate Publishing. ISBN 978-1472432865. Scarne, John. Scarne's Magic Tricks. Courier Corporation. ISBN 978-0486427799. Tarr, William. Now You See It, Now You Don't! Lessons in Sleight of Hand. Vintage Books. ISBN 0-394-72202-7. Whaley, Barton. Cheating and Deception. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-1412819435. Jones, Finn-Olaf. "Houdini in the Desert". Forbes. Retrieved 26 February 2015. Singer, Mark. "Ricky Jay's Magical Secrets". The New Yorker. Retrieved 26 February 2015. "Sleight". Oxford Dictionary. 2015. Retrieved 26 February 2015. Wells, Dominic. "The Derren Brown Factor". The Times. Retrieved 26 February 2015. Sleight of hand on YouTube Sleight of hand on https://Cardtricks.info
