Word: calculus
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last year Professor Hogben published Mathematics for the Million, a study of the history, purposes and methods of mathematics. It undertook to explain algebra, trigonometry, spherical geometry, logarithms, graphs, calculus. This turned out to be a best-selling piece of nonfiction...
...Newton, a prematurely born, posthumous son of a "wild, extravagant and weak" father, showed some aptitude for science in boyhood, went to Cambridge as a "poor scholar." In his twenties he made three of the greatest discoveries in human history: the Law of Gravitation, the system of mathematics called calculus, and the fact that white light is a composite of colored light. But he did not publish his Principia until two decades later, and then only at the urging of Halley, the comet man. After finishing the Principia, Newton almost lost his mind, but recovered and retained his faculties until...
Pointing out that in contrast with the tendencies of the National Socialist Party, the German army has exerted on the whole "a peace-preserving influence," Marx explained the apparent paradox by the fact that professional soldiers temper the prospects of glory with strategic calculations. "Strategic calculus," he stated, "made the German Army command pointedly reluctant toward Fascism's and National Socialism's 'little war', in Spain. This issue led to the inner conflict that culminated in the mass resignations misnamed the 'army purge...
...author should have explored more fully the implications of Schumpeter's definition of imperialism as an "objectless, irrational, violent disposition toward indefinite, purposeless expansion." What is implied here is the problematical contrast between absolutism's quest of glory and aggrandizement as an end in itself and the rationally oriented calculus of bourgeois capitalism. Such encomium of the profit motive strikes me as no more realistic than the Marxist interpretation of imperialism...
...examinations will be constructed so as to test not only technical competence but also originality. There will be a range of choice. A minimum of knowledge required for the examination would represent two years work in calculus, a half-year each in higher algebra and differential equations and a year's work in analytic geometry...