scholarly journals The maximum surface area polyhedron with five vertices inscribed in the sphere {\bb S}^{2}

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-74
Author(s):  
Jessica Donahue ◽  
Steven Hoehner ◽  
Ben Li

This article focuses on the problem of analytically determining the optimal placement of five points on the unit sphere {\bb S}^{2} so that the surface area of the convex hull of the points is maximized. It is shown that the optimal polyhedron has a trigonal bipyramidal structure with two vertices placed at the north and south poles and the other three vertices forming an equilateral triangle inscribed in the equator. This result confirms a conjecture of Akkiraju, who conducted a numerical search for the maximizer. As an application to crystallography, the surface area discrepancy is considered as a measure of distortion between an observed coordination polyhedron and an ideal one. The main result yields a formula for the surface area discrepancy of any coordination polyhedron with five vertices.

Author(s):  
William B. Meyer

One of the earliest historians of the Civil War saw it as a fundamental clash between the peoples of different latitudes. Climate had made the antebellum North and South distinct societies and natural enemies, John W. Draper argued, the one democratic and individualist, the other aristocratic and oligarchical. If such were the case, the future of the reunited states was hardly a bright one. But Draper saw no natural barriers to national unity that wise policy could not surmount. The restlessness and transience of American life that many deplored instead merited, in his view, every assistance possible. In particular, he wrote, Americans needed to be encouraged to move as freely across climatic zones as they already did within them. The tendency of North and South to congeal into hostile types of civilization could be frustrated, but only by an incessant mingling of people. Sectional discord was inevitable only if the natural law that "emigrants move on parallels of latitude" were left free to take its course. These patterns of emigration were left free, for the most part, but without the renewed strife that Draper feared. After the war as before it, few settlers relocating to new homes moved far to the north or south of their points of origin. As late as 1895, Henry Gannett, chief geographer to the U.S. Census, could still describe internal migration as "mainly conducted westward along parallels of latitude." More often as time went on, it was supposed that race and not merely habit underlay the pattern, that climatic preferences were innate, different stocks of people staying in the latitudes of their forbears by the compulsion of biology. Thus, it was supposed, Anglo-Saxons preferred cooler lands than Americans of Mediterranean ancestry, while those of African descent preferred warmer climates than either. Over time, though, latitude loosened its grip and exceptions to the rule multiplied. As the share of the population in farming declined, so did the strongest reason for migrants to stay within familiar climates. Even by the time Gannett wrote, the tendency that he described, though still apparent, was weaker than it had been at mid-century. It weakened because a preference for familiar climates was not a fixed human trait but one shaped by experience and wants, and capable of changing as these variables changed.


1878 ◽  
Vol 5 (7) ◽  
pp. 305-310
Author(s):  
Townshend M. Hall

The Meeting of the British Association at Plymouth has not unnaturally been the means of directing attention to some of the most complex points of Devonshire geology, and of reviving the discussion as to the age and position of the Devonian series in North and South Devon. Mr. Jukes, it will be remembered, died in 1869. Had he lived longer, his energy of purpose would doubtless have led him to carry on the work he had begun, until he could either prove the correctness of his views, or satisfy himself that the generally accepted classification was, after all, the right one. The followers of Jukes seem to confine themselves to those portions only of the district which he had more specially studied—North Somerset, Lynton and Pickwell Down; searching in almost hopeless despair amongst the lower rocks, instead of beginning at the other end of the scale, with the Millstone-grit, and tracing the beds downwards. As a result, the fossiliferous beds of the Upper Devonian have been almost entirely neglected, and their relation to the Carboniferous slates passed over.


Author(s):  
Henrich Neumann

The Ballachulish slates, exposed to the north and south of Loch Leven in Argyllshire, contain, in most places, cubes of pyrite up to half an inch in diameter. During a visit to the area in the spring of 1949 the writer's attention was attracted by the dark colour of the 'pyrite' cubes in the North Ballaehulish slate quarry a little more than a mile east of Onich. On examination these proved to consist of a mass of haphazardly orientated crystals of pyrrhotine with irregular outlines. Slates collected from the main working quarry on the south shore of Loch Leven, on the other hand, contain cubes which are single crystals of unaltered pyrite.


C. Vann Woodward’s lecture compares two commemorations of the Civil War fifty years apart, one in 1911 and the other in 1961. The first one reflected sectional reunification predicated on a shared understanding of the tragic nature of war but also a sense that the conflict had solved the problem of sectional animosity. In so doing Woodward notes that whites in the North and South could only accomplish this by excluding meaningful African-American participation. The lecture then outlines the cycles of Reconstruction historiography, and looks at the dual psychological traumas the North and South experienced in the aftermath of Reconstruction. Woodward maintains that after the North emerged victorious from the war it failed to live up to its ideals, leaving wracked guilt, self-criticism, and remorse. The South emerged with a predilection for extortion, indignation, and extreme bellicosity, consistently blaming its own weaknesses on Reconstruction. Woodward suggests that historians should act as therapists, enabling the nation to come to terms with the psychological traumas triggered by the past.


Author(s):  
Roger Ling ◽  
Paul Arthur ◽  
Georgia Clarke ◽  
Estelle Lazer ◽  
Lesley A. Ling ◽  
...  

The casa degli amanti (house of the lovers), at the south-west corner of the insula, falls into two fairly distinct halves: the atrium complex, oriented on the street to the west, and the peristyle with its surrounding rooms, oriented on the street to the south and on the property boundary to the east. In the atrium complex, the atrium is misplaced to the south of the central axis, allowing space for two large rooms to the north, one of which was possibly a shop or workshop (5.50 m. × 4.70 m.), with a separate entry from the street (I 10, 10), while the other (5.80 m. × 4.50 m.), decorated with mythological wallpaintings and provided with a wide opening on to the peristyle, must have been a dining-room or oecus (room 8). Each of these had a segmental vault rising from a height of about 3.50 m. at the spring to slightly over 4 m. at the crown. In the first the vault is missing, but the holes for some of its timbers are visible in the east wall and a groove along the north wall marks the seating for the planking attached to them; at a higher level, in the north and south walls, are the remains of beam-holes for the joists of the upper floor or attic (see below). The arrangements in room 8 are now obscured by the modern vault constructed to provide a surface for the reassembled fragments of the ceiling-paintings; but the shape of the vault is confirmed by the surviving plaster of the lunettes, while a beam-hole for the lowest of the vault-timbers is visible above the corner of the western lunette in an early photograph (Superintendency neg. C 1944). The shop I 10, 10 had a small window high in the street wall to the south of Its entrance; whether there were any additional windows above the entrance, it is impossible to say, since this part of the wall is a modern reconstruction. Room 8 was lit by a splayed window cut in the angle of the vault and the eastern lunette, opening into the upper storey of the peristyle.


2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-141
Author(s):  
Günther Schlee

Omaha kinship terminologies are distributed globally to the north and south of the belt of ancient “high cultures” which stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to East and Southeast Asia in the Old World and includes parts of Mesoamerica and the Andes in the New World. This article offers an explanation for this curious distribution of Omaha terminologies. In so doing, it reviews examples of Omaha terminologies in Central Asia and on the Horn of Africa, noting their defining characteristics and those other aspects of social organization with which they are associated. In conclusion, it is suggested that a continuum of lineage-based systems, including systems with Omaha terminologies, was split into two areas of concentration, one to the north and the other to the south, as ancient “high cultures,” based on intensive agricultural production, arose among them, reverting, in the process, to terminological systems with a cognatic bias like those of the Eskimo type that are associated with urbanization and statehood.


1928 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-75
Author(s):  
W. Douglas Simpson

The ruins of Kindrochit Castle stand in the heart of the much-frequented village of Braemar, near the head of the river Dee, amid the wild mountains of western Aberdeenshire. The castle occupies a very strong position on the east brink of a rocky gorge formed by the Clunie Water, and on the other side was defended by an ancient mill-lade, taken off the Clunie above the castle, and rejoining it below, so as to complete the insulation of the site. In the name of the castle (Kindrochit = ‘bridge-head’) is enshrined its early importance as a fortified post guarding the passage of the great north road across the Clunie Water. The map (fig. 1) clearly indicates how the significance of the castle is to be found not in the east-and-west or blind-alley strategy of the Dee valley, but rather in the north and south or transversal strategy of the ancient trunk roads converging northwards across the ‘Mounth’ or mountain barrier between Strathmore and Mar.


1992 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 419-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorren McMahon ◽  
Anthony Heath ◽  
Martin Harrop ◽  
John Curtice

Analysis of the British Election Studies suggests that migration between the north and south of Britain does have political effects, southerly migration leading voters away from Labour and northerly migration towards Labour. This pattern persists even after controls for prior social and political characteristics, experience of social mobility, and changes in local political environment. It does, however, appear to be a new phenomenon, not apparent in the earlier election studies. The results support the hypothesis that the north-south divide constitutes a distinct new political cleavage distinct from social class and the other more familiar social bases of voting behaviour.


Author(s):  
Jan Zalasiewicz

In some ways the pebble is like one of the newer computer chips, tightly packed with more information than one could ever surmise from gazing on its smooth surface. That stored information can relate to any episode in the history of the pebble, and could be derived from nearby—a microbial mat growing on the exact spot on the sea floor where the pebble sediment accumulated, perhaps. But it could come from afar, such as a micrometeorite landing in the ocean and drifting slowly down to land on that very same spot (there are likely a few of those in the pebble, too). Some information is as pristine as the day it was written, in its own particular code, into the pebble fabric; some, on the other hand, has been almost completely overwritten, when yet further information was imprinted at some later point in time. We might consider here some information that has most likely been all but erased by the pebble’s tumultuous subsequent history—not that that should stop us trying to recover what we can of it. Nevertheless, when it was written into the fabric of the pebble, it provided a clear signal that travelled easily through some 4000 miles of solid rock, straight from the centre of the Earth. This signal gently nudged and guided certain of the flakes of sediment falling on to that sea floor. It made them line up, with almost military precision, to point polewards. They form a memory of latitude. The Earth’s magnetic field is a mysterious thing. What is magnetism? As a child, I used to push together the north poles of two toy magnets, and remember even now how frustratingly difficult it was to make them touch—or how tricky it was to prevent the north and south poles from locking together when I tried to keep them just a tiny bit apart. A few years later, I looked on, impressed but with incomprehension, as a physics teacher sprinkled iron filings around a magnet, to show how they lined up along the invisible lines of force.


Author(s):  
Dennis B. Downey

This chapter provides a case study of a lynching at the other end of the northeastern seaboard: the mass mob execution by burning of George White, an African American, in Wilmington, Delaware, in June 1903. Delaware had been a slave state that did not join the Confederacy, and while it implemented a Jim Crow system similar to those in neighboring lower Mid-Atlantic states Maryland and Virginia, the state experienced less lynching. Delaware's evolving economy and social relations were strongly tied to the rapidly urbanizing regions of southeastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The chapter's analysis of the role of white and black Protestant ministers in the Wilmington mob execution and its aftermath offers significant insight into a well-publicized early-twentieth-century lynching that occurred somewhere between the North and South.


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