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Source: thevuas
faqnp-blog reblogged
Today Google celebrates Shakuntala Devi’s 84th birthday. She was popularly known as the “Human Computer”, was a child prodigy, and mental calculator. She passed away on April 21 2013, she was 83 years old. Her achievements include:
- In 1977 in the USA she competed with a computer to see who could calculate the cube root of 188,132,517 faster (she won). That same year, at the Southern Methodist University she was asked to give the 23rd root of a 201-digit number; she answered in 50 seconds. Her answer—546,372,891—was confirmed by calculations done at the U.S. Bureau of Standards by the Univac 1101 computer, for which a special program had to be written to perform such a large calculation.
- On June 18, 1980, she demonstrated the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers 7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779 picked at random by the Computer Department of Imperial College, London. She correctly answered 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730 in 28 seconds. This event is mentioned in the 1982 Guinness Book of Records.
Happy birthday Shakuntala!
As if that wasn’t awesome enough, she also (in 1977) wrote The World of Homosexuals, the first study of homosexuality in India. The book, considered “pioneering”, features interviews with two young Indian homosexual men, a male couple in Canada seeking legal marriage, a temple priest who explains his views on homosexuality, and a review of the existing literature on homosexuality. It ends with a call for decriminalising homosexuality, and “full and complete acceptance — not tolerance and not sympathy.”
The book was largely ignored because she was famous for her mathematical wizardry, so nothing of substantial import in the field of homosexuality was expected from her. Also the cultural situation in India was inhospitable for an open and elaborate discussion on this issue.
Source: angrywomenofcolorunited
faqnp-blog reblogged
faqnp-blog reblogged
faqnp-blog reblogged
faqnp-blog reblogged
faqnp-blog reblogged
faqnp-blog reblogged
faqnp-blog reblogged
faqnp-blog reblogged
Source: radiotimes.com
faqnp-blog reblogged
Combined Trek by ~ThatNordicGuy #deviantart
faqnp-blog reblogged
faqnp-blog reblogged
Nine Men’s Morris has been around since Roman times and was very popular in medieval England.
The board consists of a grid with twenty-four interesections or points. Each player has nine pieces, or “men”, usually coloured black and white. Players try to form ‘mills’— three of their own men lined horizontally or vertically—allowing a player to remove an opponent’s man from the game. A player wins by reducing the opponent to two pieces, or by leaving him without a legal move.
The game proceeds in three phases:
- placing men on vacant points
- moving men to adjacent points
- (optional phase) moving men to any vacant point when a player has been reduced to three men
Images: (top) A 13th century illustration in Libro de los juegos of the game being played with dice, (bottom) Visitors to Beamish Museum in north-east England can see this board fixed to the top of a chest in Pockerley Old Hall