scholarly journals The Secret of Ishango – On the helix structure of prime numbers

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christof Born

The Ishango bones were found in the 1950s by Belgian archaeologist Jean de Heinzelin near a Palaeolithic residence in Ishango, Africa. Inscriptions, which can be interpreted as numbers, make these bones the oldest mathematical find in human history. Interestingly, on one of the two Ishango bones, we also find the six consecutive prime numbers 5, 7, 11, 13, 17 and 19. Did Stone Age people already know the secret of the prime numbers? This question is explored in my mathematical essay “The Secret of Ishango”, an adventurous journey around the world from Basel in Switzerland to Erode in India. The presumed connection between the numbers on the Ishango bones and the structure of the prime numbers is illustrated by a sketch at the end of the text. Are the prime numbers organized as a double helix like DNA? As the physicist and mathematician Freeman John Dyson said so beautifully: “For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope.”

Author(s):  
Adam Laats

By the 1950s, tensions within the world of fundamentalism led to a new effort at reform. Self-proclaimed neo-evangelical reformers hoped to strip away some of the unnecessary harshness of fundamentalist traditions while remaining truly evangelical Christians. Often these reforms were personified in the revival campaigns of evangelist Billy Graham. The network of fundamentalist schools struggled to figure out its relationship to this new divide in the fundamentalist family. Some schools embraced the reform, while others decried it. At the same time, faculty members at all the schools wrestled with strict supervision of their religious beliefs and teaching. From time to time, schools purged suspect faculty members, as in the 1953 firing of Ted Mercer at Bob Jones University.


Author(s):  
Sam Brewitt-Taylor

This chapter outlines three examples of how secular theology was put into practice in the 1960s: Nick Stacey’s innovations in the parish of Woolwich; the radicalization of the ‘Parish and People’ organization; and the radicalization of Britain’s Student Christian Movement, which during the 1950s was the largest student religious organization in the country. The chapter argues that secular theology contained an inherent dynamic of ever-increasing radicalization, which irresistibly propelled its adherents from the ecclesiastical radicalism of the early 1960s to the more secular Christian radicalism of the late 1960s. Secular theology promised that the reunification of the church and the world would produce nothing less than the transformative healing of society. As the 1960s went on, this vision pushed radical Christian leaders to sacrifice more and more of their ecclesiastical culture as they pursued their goal of social transformation.


2000 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-65
Author(s):  
Ben Lieberman

The history of the Federal Republic of Germany is closely connected with economic achievement. Enjoying a striking economic recovery in the 1950s, the FRG became the home of the “economic miracle.” Maturing into one of the most powerful economies in the world, it became known as the “German model” by the 1970s. Now, however, the chief metaphor for the German economy is “Standort Deutschland,” and therein lies the tale of the new German problem.


2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 167-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. Issa ◽  
Chandana Jayawardena

Seeks to review the all‐inclusive concept in the context of the Caribbean. The origin of all‐inclusives in the world and the Caribbean is analysed. The concept was first introduced in holiday camps in Britain during the 1930s. Club Med is credited for popularizing the concept globally in the 1950s. However, the credit of introducing a luxury version of the all‐inclusive concept goes to a Jamaican hotelier and co‐author of this article. In defining the concept of all‐inclusives, one cannot ignore the significant role Jamaica has played. Currently, Jamaica has 17 of the best 100 all‐inclusive resorts in the world. Even though all‐inclusives are occasionally criticized, they are seen as a necessary evil. Concludes by predicting that all‐inclusives are here to stay in the Caribbean and will play a major role in tourism for the foreseeable future.


2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-224
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus

Abstract Where beaches and harbors have frequently been taken to signify openness and intermingling, a different coastal setting, the cliffs of Dover, overtly bespeaks opposition and closure. Demarcating the British coast at its closest point to continental Europe, the cliffs often stand for Britain’s supposedly elemental insularity. However, the chalk composing the cliffs makes them, in their own way, as malleable and permeable as a beach. I argue that poems by Matthew Arnold, W. H. Auden, and Daljit Nagra contest the cliffs’ association with an exclusive Britishness by focusing on their material composition. In these poems, the cliffs’ chalk—formed by fossilized marine microorganisms at a time when what would become Britain was at the bottom of a prehistoric sea—attests to Britain’s geohistorical contingency. Arnold, Auden, and Nagra use this chalk geology to develop a new model of British identity as contingent, permeable, and linked with the wider world. In these poems, that is, Dover’s cliffs collapse oppositions rather than enforcing them: they blur the lines between Britain and the world, past and present, organic and inorganic, human history and geological history. The literature of the Dover cliffs thus highlights the revisionary potential of this distinctive kind of littoral space.


1972 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Marciani ◽  
M. Terbojevic ◽  
F. Dall’Acqua

Light scattering measurements performed on DNA after irradiation in the presence of psoralen clearly show that inter strand cross linkings are present in the macromolecule. In fact after heat denaturation and successive cooling irradiated macromolecule shows a molecular weight practically unchanged while a DNA sample after the same treatment shows a molecular weight half of the intact native DNA. Also the general conformation of irradiated DNA undergoes practically to no modifications after the same heat treatment while native DNA shows itself to have been strongly modified. Moreover, on the basis of flow dichroism determinations, DNA cross-linked by psoralen after heat denaturation showed to be able to restore its ordered double helix structure, during the successive cooling.


2006 ◽  
pp. 249-258
Author(s):  
Vladimir Nikitovic

After five decades of insufficient reproduction of Vojvodina?s and Central Serbia?s population, the process of demographic ageing, came into the focus of the broadest public at last. Current Serbia?s population (without Kosovo and Metohija?s population) belongs to the group of the oldest populations in the world according to a number of indicators of demographic change. Considering population ageing as a planetary process without precedent in the human history, we tried to point out the main features of its evolution regarding spatial implications on population living in this part of Europe. The evolution of the process of population ageing during the 1981-2002 period was considered through functional relations between specific age groups. It was ascertained that the process started its spreading over Vojvodina at first, but continued to spread over Central Serbia afterwards moving the pole of demographic ageing to that part of the country. Some specific centres of demographic ageing as well as the regions which are still demographically more vital than the others were located by the analysis at the municipality level.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manvir Singh ◽  
Luke Glowacki

Many researchers assume that until 10-12,000 years ago, humans lived in small, mobile, relatively egalitarian bands composed mostly of kin. This “nomadic-egalitarian model” informs evolutionary explanations of behavior and our understanding of how contemporary societies differ from those of our evolutionary past. Here, we synthesize research challenging this model and propose an alternative, the diverse histories model, to replace it. We outline the limitations of using recent foragers as models of Late Pleistocene societies and the considerable social variation among foragers commonly considered small-scale, mobile, and egalitarian. We review ethnographic and archaeological findings covering 34 world regions showing that non-agricultural peoples often live in groups that are more sedentary, unequal, large, politically stratified, and capable of large-scale cooperation and resource management than is normally assumed. These characteristics are not restricted to extant Holocene hunter-gatherers but, as suggested by archaeological findings from 27 Middle Stone Age sites, likely characterized societies throughout the Late Pleistocene (until c. 130 ka), if not earlier. These findings have implications for how we understand human psychological adaptations and the broad trajectory of human history.


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