Free Republic

The ‘music of the spheres’ was born from the effort to use numbers to explain the universeAn image of a white half circle at the bottom-center on a starry background. There are 8 arches spreading away from the circle. The Pythagoreans believed that the motions of the heavenly bodies, with just the right ratios of their distances from a central fire, made pleasant music — a concept that evolved into the “music of the spheres.” If you’ve ever heard the phrase “the music of the spheres,” your first thought probably wasn’t about mathematics. But in its historical origin, the music...

Oxford University professor Sir Andrew Wiles has been awarded the prestigious Abel Prize for his "stunning proof" of Fermat's Last Theorem. Wiles life has been dedicated to the three-century-old theorem which has been his "passion from an early age" after he read “The Last Problem” by ET Bell. His proof was first published in 1994 while working at Princeton University in New Jersey — he will collect the award 22 years later at a ceremony in Oslo in May. The theorem, created in 1637 by French mathematician Pierre de Fermant, says that there are no solutions in integers — or...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I mentioned earlier, folks, that there's a website, CampusReform.com. They're out there surveying students, and they're telling them the truth about things. This is the demographic that voted for Obama. They're doing great work out there. What they did, they went to a campus, in this case the University of Northern Colorado, and they started asking questions of the students while showing them video of Obama lying about being able to keep your plan if you like it, being able to keep your doctor if you like him, and having your premium reduced $2,500. They're playing these...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Wow. I just checked a little bit of the White House press briefing. The spokeskid, Jay Carney, is kind of under the gun. Jessica Yellin of CNN is really having at him on this IRS business. One of the reasons why is that Jay Carney is sitting here talking about the IRS scandal, and he said, "Well, if the IRS reports are true, then the president would be outraged." What do you mean, "if" the IRS reports are true? The IRS has admitted all of this! They've already apologized for it! The IRS has confessed to a...

3.1 Information: A Fundamental Quantity The trail-blazing discoveries about the nature of energy in the 19th century caused the first technological revolution, when manual labor was replaced on a large scale by technological appliances—machines which could convert energy. In the same way, knowledge concerning the nature of information in our time initiated the second technological revolution where mental “labor” is saved through the use of technological appliances—namely, data processing machines. The concept “information” is not only of prime importance for informatics theories and communication techniques, but it is a fundamental quantity in such wide-ranging sciences as cybernetics, linguistics, biology,...