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POPSThe Growing Hunger for Political Shallowness Author Robert Harris has some biting words about the political situation we find ourselves in today. Robert Harris' new novel features a once-popular former British prime minister who becomes fiercely criticized for collaborating with the United States in the war on terror. The character's name is Adam Lang, not Tony Blair, but otherwise the similarities are unmistakable. Full interview here .
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POPSAncient Blueprints of Calculus Uncovered in Archimedes Text Details have been released from the nine-year-long reconstruction project to recover the Greek mathematician's writings from this one-of-a-kind find and the results are fascinating. Buried beneath the surface of this gilded palimpsest, researchers discovered more extensive demonstrations of concepts such as infinite series, approximations, limits, and integral calculus than had been known to exist in ancient times. Archimedes wrote The Method almost two thousand years before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz developed calculus in the 1700s. Reviel Netz, an historian of mathematics at Stanford University who transcribed the text, says that the examination of Archimedes' work has revealed "a new twist on the entire trajectory of Western mathematics."