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🔗 Grigori Perelman (Solver of Poincare Conjecture)
Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman (Russian: Григорий Яковлевич Перельман, IPA: [ɡrʲɪˈɡorʲɪj ˈjakəvlʲɪvʲɪtɕ pʲɪrʲɪlʲˈman] (listen); born 13 June 1966) is a Russian mathematician who is known for his contributions to the fields of geometric analysis, Riemannian geometry, and geometric topology.
In the 1990s, partly in collaboration with Yuri Burago, Mikhael Gromov, and Anton Petrunin, he made influential contributions to the study of Alexandrov spaces. In 1994, he proved the soul conjecture in Riemannian geometry, which had been an open problem for the previous 20 years. In 2002 and 2003, he developed new techniques in the analysis of Ricci flow, thereby providing a detailed sketch of a proof of the Poincaré conjecture and Thurston's geometrization conjecture, the former of which had been a famous open problem in mathematics for the past century. The full details of Perelman's work were filled in and explained by various authors over the following several years.
In August 2006, Perelman was offered the Fields Medal for "his contributions to geometry and his revolutionary insights into the analytical and geometric structure of the Ricci flow", but he declined the award, stating: "I'm not interested in money or fame; I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo." On 22 December 2006, the scientific journal Science recognized Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture as the scientific "Breakthrough of the Year", the first such recognition in the area of mathematics.
On 18 March 2010, it was announced that he had met the criteria to receive the first Clay Millennium Prize for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture. On 1 July 2010, he rejected the prize of one million dollars, saying that he considered the decision of the board of the Clay Institute to be unfair, in that his contribution to solving the Poincaré conjecture was no greater than that of Richard S. Hamilton, the mathematician who pioneered the Ricci flow partly with the aim of attacking the conjecture. He had previously rejected the prestigious prize of the European Mathematical Society, in 1996.
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- "Grigori Perelman" | 2023-07-01 | 28 Upvotes 3 Comments
- "Grigori Perelman – mathematician who refused to accept $1.000.000 prize" | 2022-11-11 | 16 Upvotes 2 Comments
🔗 Neskowin Ghost Forest
The Neskowin Ghost Forest is the remnants of a Sitka spruce forest on the Oregon Coast of the United States. The stumps were likely created when an earthquake of the Cascadia subduction zone abruptly lowered the trees, that were then covered by mud from landslides or debris from a tsunami. Many of the stumps are over 2,000 years old.
The stumps were unearthed when turbulent storms swept away sand during the winter of 1997–1998. It is one of over thirty ghost forests along the Oregon and Washington Coast, though many appear as flat roots and not stumps. Most notably, Washington's ghost forest of red cedars was integral to the discovery of the Cascadia fault line. These ghost forests are evidence of significant, rapid changes in coastline – often due to seismic events such as the 1700 Cascadia earthquake.
The stumps at Neskowin are 2,000 years old, according to carbon dating. While living, the trees that make up the Neskowin Ghost Forest were similar to present-day coastal rain forest. They stood 150–200 feet (46–61 m) high and were at least 200 years old when buried. However, it's difficult to determine when or how the trees died, because it occurred before written history in the region. It was originally believed that these trees died slowly, as the roots were gradually submerged in saltwater due to changes in the sea levels. Yet research by geologists revealed that the soil, still present at the roots of the stumps, was buried abruptly – indicating a more sudden and dramatic event, like an earthquake, as the cause.
The ghost forest is near Proposal Rock. It is part of the Neskowin Beach State Recreation Site. The best time to see the stumps is low tide, during winter (due to January, February and March bringing the lowest tides of the year.)
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- "Neskowin Ghost Forest" | 2023-10-25 | 34 Upvotes 1 Comments
🔗 Wikipedians question Wikimedia fundraising ethics after “somewhat-viral” tweet
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- "Wikipedians question Wikimedia fundraising ethics after “somewhat-viral” tweet" | 2022-10-31 | 479 Upvotes 334 Comments
🔗 Bangui Magnetic Anomaly
The Bangui magnetic anomaly is a local variation in the Earth's magnetic field centered at Bangui, the capital of Central African Republic. The magnetic anomaly is roughly elliptical, about 700 km × 1,000 km (430 mi × 620 mi), and covers most of the country, making it one of the "largest and most intense crustal magnetic anomalies on the African continent". The anomaly was discovered in the late 1950s, explored in the 1970s, and named in 1982. Its origin remains unclear.
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- "Bangui Magnetic Anomaly" | 2021-02-02 | 82 Upvotes 15 Comments
🔗 Ken Leishman
Kenneth Leishman (June 20, 1931 – December 14, 1979), also known as the Flying Bandit or the Gentleman Bandit was a Canadian criminal responsible for multiple robberies between 1957 and 1966. Leishman was the mastermind behind the largest gold theft in Canadian history. This record stood for over 50 years, until it was surpassed by the Toronto Pearson airport heist in 2023. After being caught and arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Leishman managed to escape twice, before being caught and serving the remainder of his various sentences.
In December 1979, while flying a Mercy Flight to Thunder Bay, Leishman's aircraft crashed about 40 miles (64 km) north of Thunder Bay.
🔗 Physical Unclonable Function
A physical unclonable function (sometimes also called physically unclonable function, which refers to a weaker security metric), or PUF, is a physical object that for a given input and conditions (challenge), provides a physically-defined "digital fingerprint" output (response) that serves as a unique identifier, most often for a semiconductor device such as a microprocessor. PUFs are most often based on unique physical variations which occur naturally during semiconductor manufacturing. A PUF is a physical entity embodied in a physical structure. Today, PUFs are usually implemented in integrated circuits and are typically used in applications with high security requirements, more specifically cryptography.
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- "Physical Unclonable Function" | 2016-02-15 | 29 Upvotes 17 Comments
🔗 Ludic Fallacy
The ludic fallacy, identified by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan (2007), is "the misuse of games to model real-life situations". Taleb explains the fallacy as "basing studies of chance on the narrow world of games and dice". The adjective ludic originates from the Latin noun ludus, meaning "play, game, sport, pastime".
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- "Ludic Fallacy" | 2020-07-23 | 119 Upvotes 79 Comments
🔗 Zooko's Triangle
Zooko's triangle is a trilemma of three properties that are generally considered desirable for names of participants in a network protocol:
- Human-meaningful: Meaningful and memorable (low-entropy) names are provided to the users.
- Secure: The amount of damage a malicious entity can inflict on the system should be as low as possible.
- Decentralized: Names correctly resolve to their respective entities without the use of a central authority or service.
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- "Zooko's Triangle" | 2022-08-17 | 79 Upvotes 40 Comments
- "Zooko's Triangle" | 2021-02-17 | 153 Upvotes 54 Comments
- "Zooko's Triangle" | 2010-08-22 | 23 Upvotes 7 Comments
🔗 Problem of Time
In theoretical physics, the problem of time is a conceptual conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics in that quantum mechanics regards the flow of time as universal and absolute, whereas general relativity regards the flow of time as malleable and relative. This problem raises the question of what time really is in a physical sense and whether it is truly a real, distinct phenomenon. It also involves the related question of why time seems to flow in a single direction, despite the fact that no known physical laws seem to require a single direction.
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- "Problem of Time" | 2020-04-05 | 63 Upvotes 49 Comments
🔗 Aristotle's Views on Women
Aristotle's views on women influenced later Western thinkers, as well as Islamic thinkers, who quoted him as an authority until the end of the Middle Ages, influencing women's history.
In his Politics, Aristotle saw women as subject to men, but as higher than slaves, and lacking authority; he believed the husband should exert political rule over the wife. Among women's differences from men were that they were, in his view, more impulsive, more compassionate, more complaining, and more deceptive. He gave the same weight to women's happiness as to men's, and in his Rhetoric stated that society could not be happy unless women were happy too. Whereas Plato was open to the potential equality of men and women, stating both that women were not equal to men in terms of strength and virtue, but were equal to men in terms of rational and occupational capacity, and hence in the ideal Republic should be educated and allowed to work alongside men without differentiation, Aristotle appears to have disagreed.
In his theory of inheritance, Aristotle considered the mother to provide a passive material element to the child, while the father provided an active, ensouling element with the form of the human species.
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- "Aristotle's Views on Women" | 2020-09-28 | 10 Upvotes 4 Comments