Engineering
Engineering is the application of knowledge in the form of science and empirical evidence, to the innovation, construction and maintenance of structures, materials, devices, systems and organizations. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad range of more specialized fields of engineering, each with a more specific emphasis on particular areas of applied mathematics, applied science, types of application. See glossary of engineering; the term engineering is derived from the Latin ingenium, meaning "cleverness" and ingeniare, meaning "to contrive, devise". The American Engineers' Council for Professional Development has defined "engineering" as: The creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination. Engineering has existed since ancient times, when humans devised inventions such as the wedge, lever and pulley; the term engineering is derived from the word engineer, which itself dates back to 1390 when an engine'er referred to "a constructor of military engines."
In this context, now obsolete, an "engine" referred to a military machine, i.e. a mechanical contraption used in war. Notable examples of the obsolete usage which have survived to the present day are military engineering corps, e.g. the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers; the word "engine" itself is of older origin deriving from the Latin ingenium, meaning "innate quality mental power, hence a clever invention."Later, as the design of civilian structures, such as bridges and buildings, matured as a technical discipline, the term civil engineering entered the lexicon as a way to distinguish between those specializing in the construction of such non-military projects and those involved in the discipline of military engineering. The pyramids in Egypt, the Acropolis and the Parthenon in Greece, the Roman aqueducts, Via Appia and the Colosseum, Teotihuacán, the Brihadeeswarar Temple of Thanjavur, among many others, stand as a testament to the ingenuity and skill of ancient civil and military engineers.
Other monuments, no longer standing, such as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Pharos of Alexandria were important engineering achievements of their time and were considered among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The earliest civil engineer known by name is Imhotep; as one of the officials of the Pharaoh, Djosèr, he designed and supervised the construction of the Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara in Egypt around 2630–2611 BC. Ancient Greece developed machines in both military domains; the Antikythera mechanism, the first known mechanical computer, the mechanical inventions of Archimedes are examples of early mechanical engineering. Some of Archimedes' inventions as well as the Antikythera mechanism required sophisticated knowledge of differential gearing or epicyclic gearing, two key principles in machine theory that helped design the gear trains of the Industrial Revolution, are still used today in diverse fields such as robotics and automotive engineering. Ancient Chinese, Greek and Hungarian armies employed military machines and inventions such as artillery, developed by the Greeks around the 4th century BC, the trireme, the ballista and the catapult.
In the Middle Ages, the trebuchet was developed. Before the development of modern engineering, mathematics was used by artisans and craftsmen, such as millwrights, clock makers, instrument makers and surveyors. Aside from these professions, universities were not believed to have had much practical significance to technology. A standard reference for the state of mechanical arts during the Renaissance is given in the mining engineering treatise De re metallica, which contains sections on geology and chemistry. De re metallica was the standard chemistry reference for the next 180 years; the science of classical mechanics, sometimes called Newtonian mechanics, formed the scientific basis of much of modern engineering. With the rise of engineering as a profession in the 18th century, the term became more narrowly applied to fields in which mathematics and science were applied to these ends. In addition to military and civil engineering, the fields known as the mechanic arts became incorporated into engineering.
Canal building was an important engineering work during the early phases of the Industrial Revolution. John Smeaton was the first self-proclaimed civil engineer and is regarded as the "father" of civil engineering, he was an English civil engineer responsible for the design of bridges, canals and lighthouses. He was a capable mechanical engineer and an eminent physicist. Using a model water wheel, Smeaton conducted experiments for seven years, determining ways to increase efficiency. Smeaton introduced iron gears to water wheels. Smeaton made mechanical improvements to the Newcomen steam engine. Smeaton designed the third Eddystone Lighthouse where he pioneered the use of'hydraulic lime' and developed a technique involving dovetailed blocks of granite in the building of the lighthouse, he is important in the history, rediscovery of, development of modern cement, because he identified the compositional requirements needed to obtain "hydraulicity" in lime.
Economics
Economics is the social science that studies the production and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents. Microeconomics analyzes basic elements in the economy, including individual agents and markets, their interactions, the outcomes of interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, firms and sellers. Macroeconomics analyzes the entire economy and issues affecting it, including unemployment of resources, economic growth, the public policies that address these issues. See glossary of economics. Other broad distinctions within economics include those between positive economics, describing "what is", normative economics, advocating "what ought to be". Economic analysis can be applied throughout society, in business, health care, government. Economic analysis is sometimes applied to such diverse subjects as crime, the family, politics, social institutions, war and the environment; the discipline was renamed in the late 19th century due to Alfred Marshall, from "political economy" to "economics" as a shorter term for "economic science".
At that time, it became more open to rigorous thinking and made increased use of mathematics, which helped support efforts to have it accepted as a science and as a separate discipline outside of political science and other social sciences. There are a variety of modern definitions of economics. Scottish philosopher Adam Smith defined what was called political economy as "an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations", in particular as: a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people... to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue for the publick services. Jean-Baptiste Say, distinguishing the subject from its public-policy uses, defines it as the science of production and consumption of wealth. On the satirical side, Thomas Carlyle coined "the dismal science" as an epithet for classical economics, in this context linked to the pessimistic analysis of Malthus. John Stuart Mill defines the subject in a social context as: The science which traces the laws of such of the phenomena of society as arise from the combined operations of mankind for the production of wealth, in so far as those phenomena are not modified by the pursuit of any other object.
Alfred Marshall provides a still cited definition in his textbook Principles of Economics that extends analysis beyond wealth and from the societal to the microeconomic level: Economics is a study of man in the ordinary business of life. It enquires how he uses it. Thus, it is on the one side, the study of wealth and on the other and more important side, a part of the study of man. Lionel Robbins developed implications of what has been termed "erhaps the most accepted current definition of the subject": Economics is a science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses. Robbins describes the definition as not classificatory in "pick out certain kinds of behaviour" but rather analytical in "focus attention on a particular aspect of behaviour, the form imposed by the influence of scarcity." He affirmed that previous economists have centred their studies on the analysis of wealth: how wealth is created and consumed. But he said that economics can be used to study other things, such as war, that are outside its usual focus.
This is because war has as the goal winning it, generates both cost and benefits. If the war is not winnable or if the expected costs outweigh the benefits, the deciding actors may never go to war but rather explore other alternatives. We cannot define economics as the science that studies wealth, crime and any other field economic analysis can be applied to; some subsequent comments criticized the definition as overly broad in failing to limit its subject matter to analysis of markets. From the 1960s, such comments abated as the economic theory of maximizing behaviour and rational-choice modelling expanded the domain of the subject to areas treated in other fields. There are other criticisms as well, such as in scarcity not accounting for the macroeconomics of high unemployment. Gary Becker, a contributor to the expansion of economics into new areas, describes the approach he favours as "combin assumptions of maximizing behaviour, stable preferences, market equilibrium, used relentlessly and unflinchingly."
One commentary characterizes the remark as making economics an approach rather than a subject matter but with great specificity as to the "choice process and the type of social interaction that analysis involves." The same source reviews a range of definitions included in principles of economics textbooks and concludes that the lack of agreement need not affect the subject-matter that the texts treat. A
Lucio Russo
Lucio Russo is an Italian physicist and historian of science. Born in Venice, he teaches at the Mathematics Department of the University of Rome Tor Vergata. Among his main areas of interest are Gibbs measure of the Ising model, percolation theory, finite Bernoulli schemes, within which he proved an approximate version of the classical Kolmogorov's zero–one law. In the history of science, he has reconstructed some contributions of the Hellenistic astronomer Hipparchus, through the analysis of his surviving works, the proof of heliocentrism attributed by Plutarch to Seleucus of Seleucia and studied the history of theories of tides, from the Hellenistic to modern age. In The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn, Russo promotes the belief that Hellenistic science in the period 320–144 BC reached heights not achieved by Classical age science, proposes that it went further than ordinarily thought, in multiple fields not associated with ancient science.
Hellenistic science was focused on the city of Alexandria. The emerging scientific revolution in Alexandria was ended, he engaged in mass expulsions of all intellectuals. Other centers of Hellenistic science mentioned in Russo's book were Antioch, Cyzicus, Rhodes and Massilia, he concludes that the 17th-century scientific revolution in Europe was due in large part to the recovery of Hellenistic science. The Forgotten Revolution has received mixed reviews, praising Russo's enthusiasm but noting that his conclusions outreach his sources. In L' America dimenticata, Russo suggests that the Americas were known to some European civilizations in ancient times discovered by the Phoenicians or the Carthaginians, but that the knowledge was lost under Roman expansion in the 2nd century BCE. Antikythera mechanism, a Hellenistic astronomical computer, according to Russo, is a proof of the high level of knowledge in science and technology reached during Hellenism Biografia Lucio Russo
Domenicangela Lina Unali
Domenicangela Lina Unali has been Professor of English Literature at the Faculty of Letters, University of Rome Tor Vergata since 1983. From 1969 to 1982, she taught at the University of Cagliari, she was Secretary and Treasurer of AISNA in the years 1971-1973. Born in Rome on November 18, 1936, her parents came from Logudor in North-Eastern Sardinia, her ancestors, on her mother's side, had the family name of Morla, in the town of Bortigali according to the parish records they were present since 1680. A novel by Lina Unali entitled Generale Andaluso is about General Thomas Morla whom her family considered an ancestor. Both her father, Gen. Eugenio Unali, her mother Maria Pinna daughter of Giuseppina Salaris Morla and of the painter Salvatorico Pinna from the Belle Arti Academy, founded in 1870, were born in Pozzomaggiore, her Sardinian origins has been relevant in her life and studies. She is now listed among the authors of contemporary Sardinian literature, she is the author of an online Logudorese-Italian Glossary, published by Babylon based on her mother’s language as she remembered it after her death.
Unali has combined scientific research with the writing of poetry and narratives. She published La Sardegna del Desiderio in, she received the Alghero Donna National Prize for works of narrative in 1995, the Parola di Donna Prize for works of poetry in 2002 and the same prize for fiction in 2003. At Cagliari, in 2013 she received a special mention in the Fernando Pilia Literary Award for criticism; the book The West in Asia and Asia in the West: Essays on Transnational Interactions is dedicated in tribute to the professional and academic achievements of Unali. Unali was engaged in research on the relationship between West, she published the book Talk Story in Chinatown and Away based on the Conference of the Association of American Studies in Warsaw to which she contributed with a Panel. On, in the year 2000, the essay "'Complexity is not a Crime': Marianne Moore’s Cultural Poetics" by Eulalia Piñero C. Gil, from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, quoting Unali, defined her scholarly profile as both that of an Americanist and of a Sinologist.
A student of Agostino Lombardo at Sapienza University of Rome and an assistant for several years in the Institute directed by Mario Praz, she continued her studies in the United States with a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she attended classes on poetry held by Theodore Roethke and in the second semester, moved to the Department of English of Harvard University. She obtained a Fulbright visiting professorship at Harvard University, under the sponsorship of Joel Porte. In the years 1961-62, she shared her American experience with the economist Pierangelo Garegnani, whom she married in 1964. Under the patronage of Jawaharlal Nehru University, she did research on intercultural relations between England and India in the years from 1981 to 1985, she obtained a Fellowship from the Taiwan Academy of Science that engaged her for one year in research and teaching, directing in particular her attention to the study of the Chinese culture and language. She taught several courses at the National Taiwan University among which History of European Thought and American Poetry.
She taught at the Somali National University, in the years 1981, 1988 and 1989. Lina Unali is the honorary president of the Center Asia and the West by her founded in 2008 for the study of the relationships between Europe and Asia. While in Taipei she published an Anthology of Italian poetry entitled Modern Italian Poetry. In the academic year 2006-2007 she has been Director of the Doctorate in Foreign Languages and Literatures at the Faculty of Letters of her University, she is an established poet, her most recent compositions were published in the Paterson Literary Review. She obtained a certificate of merit at the concorso di poesia "S. Agata dei Goti" 2019 "Poesie di Langston Hughes", Giornale di Poesia, Roma, 1960 "Marianne Moore", Studi Americani, no. 9, Roma, 1964 "Introduzione a Edward Dahlberg", Studi Americani, no. 11, Roma, 1965 Mente e Misura. La Poesia di William Carlos Williams, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Roma, 1970, ISBN 9788884985484'L’Uccello del tuono e la balena'", A Note on a North Western American-Indian Tribe", Conoscenza religiosa, ed. by Elemire Zolla, La Nuova Italia, Firenze, 1970.
Reprinted in Cultura indigena d'America, Scritti da "Conoscenza Religiosa" ed. by Grazia Marchianò, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, November 2015, ISBN 978-88-6372-786-9 Margaret Mead, Il Futuro senza volto: continuità nell’evoluzione culturale, translated by Lina Unali, Bari, 1972, ISBN A0001874429 "Sulla Divinity School Address di Ralph Waldo Emerson e sull’uso della parola Soul", Annali delle Facoltà di Lettere-Filosofia e Magistero, vol. XXXVI, 1973, Università degli Studi di Cagliari, Sassari, 1974 Rivoluzioni a Harvard, capitoli della storia culturale della Nuova Inghilterra, La Nuova Italia, Firenze, 1977, OCLC 4131297 "Ginsberg non vale a niente Steinbeck è un grande scrittore...", Paese Sera Libri, September 11, 1977 "Un'Tributo' al grande poeta","Quel viaggio in Taxi con Robert Lowell", Paese Sera Libri, September 7, 1979 "Metaphorical and Spiritual Language in No Cross No Crown by William Penn", Annali della Facoltà di Magistero, Cagliari, 1979 Descrizione di sé. Studio della scrittura autobiografica del ’700, Roma, 1979, ISBN 9788870331318 Yuri Lotman, "Sulla poesia: Testo e Sistema" (the final chapters of Analiž poetičeskogo teksta: strykt
René Schoof
René Schoof is a mathematician from the Netherlands who works in Algebraic Number Theory, Arithmetic Algebraic Geometry, Computational Number Theory and Coding Theory. He received his Ph. D. in 1985 from the University of Amsterdam with Hendrik Lenstra. He is now a professor at the University Tor Vergata in Rome. In 1985, Schoof discovered an algorithm which enabled him to count points on elliptic curves over finite fields in polynomial time; this was important for the use of elliptic curves in cryptography, represented a theoretical breakthrough, as it was the first deterministic polynomial time algorithm for counting points on elliptic curves. The algorithms known before were of exponential running time, his algorithm was improved by A. O. L. Noam Elkies, he obtained the best known result extending Deligne's Theorem for finite flat group schemes to the non commutative setting, over certain local Artinian rings. His interests range throughout Algebraic Number Theory, Arakelov theory, Iwasawa theory, problems related to existence and classification of Abelian varieties over the rationals with bad reduction in one prime only, algorithms.
In the past, René has worked with Rubik's cubes by creating a common strategy in speedsolving used to set many world records known as F2L Pairs, in which the solver creates four 2-piece "pairs" with one edge and corner piece which are each "inserted" into F2L slots in the CFOP method to finish the first two layers of a 3x3x3 Rubik's cube. This strategy is used for all cubes of higher order in the Reduction and Hoya methods if CFOP is used for their 3x3x3 stages, he wrote a book on Catalan's conjecture. Schoof's algorithm Schoof–Elkies–Atkin algorithm Homepage Counting points of elliptic curves over finite fields, Journal des Théories des Nombres de Bordeaux, No. 7, 1995, 219–254, pdf With Gerard van der Geer, Ben Moonen: Number fields and function fields – two parallel worlds, Birkhäuser 2005 Finite flat group schemes over Artin rings, Compositio Mathematica, v. 128, 1–15 Catalan´s Conjecture, Springer, 2008
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a collegiate public research university in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Founded in 1209 and granted a Royal Charter by King Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's fourth-oldest surviving university; the university grew out of an association of scholars who left the University of Oxford after a dispute with the townspeople. The two'ancient universities' share many common features and are referred to jointly as'Oxbridge'; the history and influence of the University of Cambridge has made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Cambridge is formed from a variety of institutions which include 31 constituent Colleges and over 100 academic departments organised into six schools. Cambridge University Press, a department of the university, is the world's oldest publishing house and the second-largest university press in the world; the university operates eight cultural and scientific museums, including the Fitzwilliam Museum, as well as a botanic garden.
Cambridge's libraries hold a total of around 15 million books, eight million of which are in Cambridge University Library, a legal deposit library. In the fiscal year ending 31 July 2018, the university had a total income of £1.965 billion, of which £515.5 million was from research grants and contracts. In the financial year ending 2017, the central university and colleges had combined net assets of around £11.8 billion, the largest of any university in the country. However, the true extent of Cambridge's wealth is much higher as many colleges hold their historic main sites, which date as far back as the 13th century, at depreceated valuations. Furthermore, many of the wealthiest colleges do not account for “heritage assets” such as works of art, libraries or artefacts, whose value many college accounts describe as “immaterial”; the university is linked with the development of the high-tech business cluster known as'Silicon Fen'. It is a member of numerous associations and forms part of the'golden triangle' of English universities and Cambridge University Health Partners, an academic health science centre.
As of 2018, Cambridge is the top-ranked university in the United Kingdom according to all major league tables. As of September 2017, Cambridge is ranked the world's second best university by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, is ranked 3rd worldwide by Academic Ranking of World Universities, 6th by QS, 7th by US News. According to the Times Higher Education ranking, no other institution in the world ranks in the top 10 for as many subjects; the university has educated many notable alumni, including eminent mathematicians, politicians, philosophers, writers and foreign Heads of State. As of March 2019, 118 Nobel Laureates, 11 Fields Medalists, 7 Turing Award winners and 15 British Prime Ministers have been affiliated with Cambridge as students, faculty or research staff. By the late 12th century, the Cambridge area had a scholarly and ecclesiastical reputation, due to monks from the nearby bishopric church of Ely. However, it was an incident at Oxford, most to have led to the establishment of the university: two Oxford scholars were hanged by the town authorities for the death of a woman, without consulting the ecclesiastical authorities, who would take precedence in such a case, but were at that time in conflict with King John.
The University of Oxford went into suspension in protest, most scholars moved to cities such as Paris and Cambridge. After the University of Oxford reformed several years enough scholars remained in Cambridge to form the nucleus of the new university. In order to claim precedence, it is common for Cambridge to trace its founding to the 1231 charter from King Henry III granting it the right to discipline its own members and an exemption from some taxes. A bull in 1233 from Pope Gregory IX gave graduates from Cambridge the right to teach "everywhere in Christendom". After Cambridge was described as a studium generale in a letter from Pope Nicholas IV in 1290, confirmed as such in a bull by Pope John XXII in 1318, it became common for researchers from other European medieval universities to visit Cambridge to study or to give lecture courses; the colleges at the University of Cambridge were an incidental feature of the system. No college is as old as the university itself; the colleges were endowed fellowships of scholars.
There were institutions without endowments, called hostels. The hostels were absorbed by the colleges over the centuries, but they have left some traces, such as the name of Garret Hostel Lane. Hugh Balsham, Bishop of Ely, founded Peterhouse, Cambridge's first college, in 1284. Many colleges were founded during the 14th and 15th centuries, but colleges continued to be established until modern times, although there was a gap of 204 years between the founding of Sidney Sussex in 1596 and that of Downing in 1800; the most established college is Robinson, built in the late 1970s. However, Homerton College only achieved full university college status in March 2010, making it the newest full college. In medieval times, many colleges were founded so that their members would pray for the souls of the founders, were associated with chapels or abbeys; the colleges' focus changed in 1536 with the Dissolution of the Monasteries. King Henry VIII ordered the university to disband its Faculty of Canon Law and to stop teaching "scholastic philosophy".
In response, colleges changed
ESA Centre for Earth Observation
The ESA Centre for Earth Observation is a research centre belonging to the European Space Agency, located in Frascati, Italy. It is dedicated to research involving earth observation data taken from satellites, among other specialised activities; the establishment hosts the European Space Agency's development team for the Vega launcher. ESLAR, a laboratory for advanced research was created in 1966 to break the political deadlock over the location of ESLAB. Renamed ESRIN, an acronym for European Space Research Institute, ESLAR was based in Frascati; the ESRO Convention describes ESRINs' role in the following manner:...to undertake laboratory and theoretical research in the basic physics and chemistry necessary to the understanding of past and the planning of future experiments in space. The facility began acquiring data from environmental satellites within Earthnet programme in the 1970s. European Space Operations Centre European Space Research and Technology Centre European Space Astronomy Centre European Astronaut Centre European Centre for Space Applications and Telecommunications Guiana Space Centre European Space Tracking Network European Space Agency Official website
