onsets

The personification of death as a living, sentient entity is a concept that has existed in many societies since the beginning of recorded history. In Western cultures, death is usually given the name "The Grim Reaper" and shown as a skeletal figure carrying a large scythe, and wearing a midnight black gown, robe or cloak with a hood, or sometimes, a white burial shroud. Usually when portrayed in the black-hooded gown, only his eyes can be seen.

The character of Death has recurred many times in popular fiction. He has made appearances in many stories, from serious dramatic fiction to comedy, including playing roles in science fiction and fantasy stories.

Films

1) In 1957, Swedish director Ingmar Bergman made The Seventh Seal, an influential (and heavily symbolic) movie depicting one of the most famous moments in the fictional portrayal of Death. In the movie, a medieval knight (Max von Sydow) returning from a crusade plays a game of chess with Death, with the knight's life depending upon the outcome of the game. American film critic Roger Ebert remarked that this image "[is] so perfect it has survived countless parodies."The influence of Bergman's depiction has been wide.

2) Woody Allen wrote a short story in which Death loses a game of gin rummy after clumsily entering a man's apartment and trying to cow him into going quietly.

3) Bob Burden's surrealist comic book, "The Flaming Carrot", features a cover in which the title character rejects Death's offer of playing chess and suggests instead lawn darts.
The final act of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life has Death going into a house to pick up a group of people sitting down to dinner who were killed by the salmon mousse. He then takes them (and their cars) into the afterlife.

4) In the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Last Action Hero, Bergman's Death is brought into the real world temporarily, played by Sir Ian McKellen.

5) In Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey Bill and Ted play a number of games including Twister, Battleship etc. with the Bergman inspired death in order to escape from hell.

6) In the Adam Sandler movie Click, Sandler portrays Michael Newman that uses a remote to control aspects of his life. Death is represented by Morty (Christopher Walken) who takes Michael's father and afterwards Michael himself as he shows the importance of living life day by day.

7) In the Brad Pitt movie Meet Joe Black, Pitt plays the role of Joe Black, the human incarnation of Death.

8) The Hogfather a two part miniseries based on a book of the same name, aired on Sky One in christmas 2006. In it Death has to become the equivalent of Father Christmas in order to save the world, with the help of his Granddaughter.

Source : www.wikipedia.org

The current list of constellations recognised by the International Astronomical Union is based on those listed by Claudius Ptolemy, Greek-speaking mathematician, geographer, astronomer, and astrologer who lived in the Hellenistic culture of Roman Egypt. He may have been a Hellenized Egyptian, but he was probably of Greek ancestry, although no description of his family background or physical appearance exists, though it is likely he was born in Egypt, probably in or near Alexandria.

Greek astronomy was built on Mesopotamian foundations. They defined the Zodiac and at least another 18 constellations taken over or adapted by the Greeks:

The earliest direct evidence for the constellations comes from inscribed stones and clay writing tablets dug up in Mesopotamia (within modern Iraq)... It appears that the bulk of the Mesopotamian constellations were created within a relatively short interval from around 1300 to 1000 B.C...

The Mesopotamian groupings turn up in many of the classical Greek constellations. The stars of the Greek Capricorn and Gemini, for example, were known to the Assyrians by similar names - the Goat-Fish and the Great Twins. A total of 20 constellations are straight copies. Another 10 have the same stars but different names. The Assyrian Hired Man and the Swallow, for instance, were renamed Aries and Pisces.

In more recent times, Ptolemy's list has been added to in order to fill gaps between Ptolemy's patterns. The Greeks considered the sky as including both constellations and dim spaces between. But Renaissance star catalogs by Johann Bayer and John Flamsteed required every star to be in a constellation, and the number of visible stars in a constellation to be manageably small.

The constellations around the South Pole were not observable by the Greeks. Twelve were created by Dutch navigators Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman in the sixteenth century and first cataloged by Johann Bayer. Several more were created by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in his posthumous Coelum Australe Stelliferum, published in 1763.

Other proposed constellations didn't make the cut, most notably Quadrans Muralis (now part of Boötes) for which the Quadrantid meteors are named. Also the ancient constellation Argo Navis was so big that it was broken up into several different constellations, for the convenience of stellar cartographers.

Source : www.wikipedia.org

A few mathematicians obtain artistic delight from their work, and from mathematics overall. They express this pleasure by describing mathematics (or, at least, some aspect of mathematics) as beautiful. Sometimes mathematicians describe mathematics as an art form or, at a minimum, as a artistic action. Comparisons are often made with music and poetry.Bertrand Russell expressed his sense of mathematical beauty in these words:

“ Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.” (The Study of Mathematics, in Mysticism and Logic, and Other Essays, ch. 4, London: Longmans, Green, 1918.)

Paul Erdős articulated his views on the ineffability of mathematics when he said "Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is."

Mathematics arises wherever there are difficult problems that involve quantity, structure, space, or change. At first these were initiate in commerce, land measurement and later astronomy; these days, all sciences propose problems studied by mathematicians, and a lot of problems arise within mathematics itself. Newton was one of the insignificant calculus inventors, Feynman invented the Feynman path integral using a mixture of reasoning and physical insight, and today's string premise also inspires new mathematics. Some mathematics is only relevant in the area that inspired it, and is applied to solve further problems in that area. But often mathematics inspired by one area proves useful in many areas, and joins the general stock of mathematical concepts. The remarkable fact that even the "purest" mathematics often turns out to have useful applications is what Eugene Wigner has called "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics."

As in most areas of study, the explosion of knowledge in the scientific age has led to specialization in mathematics. One most important difference is between pure mathematics and applied mathematics. Some areas of applied mathematics have merged with related traditions outside of mathematics and become disciplines in their own right, including statistics, operations research, and computer science.

For those who are mathematically inclined, there is often a definite aesthetic aspect to much of mathematics. Many mathematicians talk about the grace of mathematics, its intrinsic aesthetics and inner beauty. Simplicity and generality are valued. There is beauty in a simple and elegant proof, such as Euclid's proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers, and in an elegant numerical method that speeds calculation, such as the fast Fourier transform. G. H. Hardy in A Mathematician's Apology expressed the belief that these aesthetic considerations are, in themselves, sufficient to justify the study of pure mathematics. Mathematicians often try hard to find proofs of theorems that are mostly elegant, a quest Paul Erdős often referred to as finding proofs from "The Book" in which God had written down his favorite proofs. The popularity of leisure mathematics is another symbol of the pleasure many find in solving mathematical questions.

Beauty in method

Mathematicians describe an especially pleasing method of proof as elegant. Depending on situation, this may mean:

* A proof that uses a minimum of additional assumptions or previous results.
* A proof that is unusually short.
* A proof that derives a result in a surprising way (e.g. from an apparently unrelated theorem or collection of theorems.)
* A proof that is based on new and original insights.
* A method of proof that can be easily generalised to solve a family of similar problems.

Beauty in results

Some mathematicians see beauty in mathematical results which establish connections between two areas of mathematics that at first sight emerge to be completely unconnected. These results are often described as deep.

While it is hard to find total agreement on whether a result is deep, some examples are often cited. One is Euler's identity eiπ + 1 = 0. This has been called "the most extraordinary formula in mathematics" by Richard Feynman. Modern examples take in the modularity theorem which establishes an significant connection between elliptic curves and modular forms (work on which led to the awarding of the Wolf Prize to Andrew Wiles and Robert Langlands), and "monstrous moonshine" which connected the Monster group to modular functions via a string theory for which Richard Borcherds was awarded the Fields medal.

The opposite of deep is trivial. A trivial theorem may be a result that can be derived in an obvious and straightforward way from other known results, or which applies only to a specific set of exacting objects such as the empty set. From time to time, however, a proclamation of a theorem can be unique enough to be considered deep, even though its proof is comparatively obvious.

Beauty in experience

Some degree of enchantment in the exploitation of numbers and symbols is probably necessary to engage in any mathematics. Given the efficacy of mathematics in science and engineering, it is likely that any technical society will actively cultivate these aesthetics, certainly in its beliefs of science if nowhere else.

The most intense experience of mathematical beauty for most mathematicians comes from actively engaging in mathematics. It is very difficult to like or appreciate mathematics in a simply inactive approach - in mathematics there is no real correspondence of the role of the watcher, listeners, or observer. Bertrand Russell referred to the rigorous beauty of mathematics.


Source : www.wikipedia.org

There is no complete explanation of life; there are a diversity of definitions proposed by different scientists. To define life in indisputable terms is still a challenge for scientists.

Usual definition: Often scientists say that life is a characteristic of organisms that show the following phenomena:

1. Homeostasis: instruction of the internal environment to maintain a regular state; for example, sweating to reduce high temperature.

2. Organization: Being composed of one or more cells, which are the vital units of life.

3. Metabolism: Consumption of energy by converting nonliving material into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing organic matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.

4. Growth: Maintenance of a higher rate of synthesis than catalysis. A growing organism increases in mass in all of its parts, quite than purely accumulating matter. The particular species begins to multiply and get bigger as the progression continues to flourish.

5. Adaptation: The capability to modify over a period of time in reply to the environment. This ability is essential to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity as well as the composition of metabolized substances, and outside factors present.

6. Response to stimuli: A response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism when touched to complex reactions involving all the senses of higher animals. A response is often expressed by motion, for example, the leaves of a plant turning near the sun or an animal chasing its prey.

7. Reproduction: The ability to produce new organisms. Reproduction can be the division of one cell to form two new cells. Usually the term is applied to the production of a new individual (either asexually, from a single parent organism, or sexually, from at least two differing parent organisms), although severely speaking it also describes the invention of new cells in the process of growth.

However, others cite some limitations of this definition. Thus, many members of several species do not reproduce, possibly because they belong to specialized sterile castes (such as ant workers), these are still considered forms of life. One could say that the possessions of life is hereditary; hence, sterile or hybrid organisms such as the mule, liger or eunuchs are alive although they are not capable of self reproduction.

Proposed definitions of life include:

1. Living things are systems that tend to respond to changes in their environment, and inside themselves, in such a way as to promote their own continuation.

2. Life is a characteristic of self-organizing, self-recycling systems consisting of populations of replicators that are capable of mutation, around most of which homeostatic, metabolizing organisms change.

The above definition includes worker caste ants, viruses and mules while precluding flames. It also explains why bees can be alive and yet commit suicide in defending their hive. They are only individual instances of the living structure that comprises all life forms on planet Earth (which is the only living system known to mankind).

1. Type of organization of matter producing various interacting forms of variable complexity, whose main property is to replicate almost completely by using substance and power accessible in their environment to which they may adjust. In this definition "almost perfectly" relates to mutations happening during imitation of organisms that may have adaptive benefits.

2. Life is a potentially self-perpetuating open system of linked natural reactions, catalyzed at the same time and almost isothermally by multipart chemicals (enzymes) that are themselves produced by the open system.

Of course we need to admit that our concept of life is based on our own perception of the universe. We can practice that we are living and from there we enlarge the theory of life with forms, entities with similar properties, like flora and fauna. As it was discovered how we are made up out off cells, being made up out off cells has by some been qualified as a indispensable property of life. But, as illustrated above, this is probably not the case when speaking of more hypothetical and non-traditional forms of life, thus also other properties could be an indication for life, like for example a certain form of sentience, conscience, intelligence and/or sapience. Thus the definition of life is rather made up out of multiple possibilities of life to exist, by some qualities which are unified in human life (although it needs to be considered that some possibilities might not be represented in humans, in this case it could be problematic to conclude whether it is really living or not).
But all these possibilities might theoretically also lead to a form of life on their own.

Source : www.wikipedia.org