Persian mathematician and astronomer Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, who lived in Baghdad around A.D. 800, worked on a value of pi calculated to four digits: 3.1416. The term “algorithm” derives from his name, and his text Kitab al-Jabr wal-Muqabala (The Book of Completion Concerning Calculating by Transposition and Reduction) gives us the word “algebra” from al-Jabr, which means “completion” or “restoration”.
Enlightened Muslims are generally regarded as the catalyst that enabled European Christians to pull themselves back from the Dark Ages. Until then, little was known of fundamental mathematics or the external world.
In the 19th century, the term “Dark Ages” was widely used by historians. In 1860, in “The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy”, Jacob Burckhardt made the contrast between the “dark ages” of the medieval period and the more “enlightened” Renaissance. However, the early 20th century saw a radical re-evaluation of the Middle Ages, and questioned the terminology of darkness, and its pejorative use. Historian Denys Hay exemplified this when he spoke ironically of “the lively centuries which we call dark”.
Buttons were not used as fasteners until the 13th century, when Germans learned to breed sheep with long-fiber wool, and brought the spinning wheel from India. That enabled the production of thread strong enough to be used to hold buttons on and reinforce buttonholes or loops. The oldest known spinning wheel from Europe dates frm 1280.
A well known photograph of Mahatma Gandhi, taken in 1946 for Life magazine by photographer Margaret Bourke-White, shows him with his spinning wheel. At the time he would spin every day for an hour beginning usually at 4. All members of his ashram had to spin. He and his followers encouraged everyone to spin; even Margaret Bourke-White was asked to lay aside her camera to spin.
Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist, at 78 years old.
Gandhi’s father was Hindu.
The famous pic gkster mentioned: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/56/Gandhi_spinning_wheel.jpeg
Just a few hours before he was assassinated, President John F. Kennedy called FDR’s first Vice President, John Nance Garner, Democrat of Texas, to wish him a happy 95th birthday.
John Nance Garner served two terms as Vice-President under FDR. Although he began as a strong Roosevelt supporter, by his second term he was so opposed to some of Roosevelt’s policies, such as the court-packing plan, that Harold Ickes considered that Garner was knifing FDR.
There have been exactly two US Vice Presidents who served two terms and went on to become President: John Adams, and George HW Bush.
Six Secretaries of State have gone on to become U.S. President. If Hillary Clinton does it she will be the 7th, and the first to do so since James Buchanan.
James Madison had the unusual distinction that he had two Vice-Presidents, both of whom died in office: Clinton and Gerry.
Of the 47 Vice Presidents of the US to date, 7 died while in office. But that hasn’t happened in over 100 years. All 7 died of natural causes. None were assassinated.
Year Died in Office / VP Who Died / President of the VP
1912: James S. Sherman / Taft
1899: Garret Hobart / McKinley
1885: Thomas Hendricks / Cleveland
1875: Henry Wilson / Grant
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- 1853: William King / Pierce
1814: Elbridge Gerry / Madison
1812: George Clinton / Madison
- 1853: William King / Pierce
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- William King was dying of tuberculosis, and he was in Cuba hoping the weather would benefit him when Pierce was inaugurated. He was so ill, Congress allowed him to be sworn into office from Cuba. His health continued to fail and he headed home to Alabama where he died at the age of 67 after just 45 days as VP. Vice President King never set foot in Washington, D.C. during his brief Vice Presidency.
Edit: William King is the only United States executive official to take the oath of office on foreign soil.
William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover are the only two American presidents who were elected to the presidency despite having never been elected to previous office or served as a high-ranking military officer; however, both served as high-ranking federal government officials.
Herbert Hoover is the only US President to graduate from Stanford University. John Kennedy went to Stanford, but withdrew.
Woodrow Wilson is the first and only President to have earned a Ph.D. (Johns Hopkins University, 1886; his doctoral dissertation was Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics).
There have been six major league baseball players from Latin America with the first name Wilson. Four from Dominican Republic and two from Venezuela. Only one from the USA. The letter W does not naturally occur in any Spanish language words or names.
The whole number p>1 is a prime if and only if (p-1)!+1 is a whole multiple of p. This is called Wilson’s Theorem despite that it was first conjectured by Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham 750 years before Wilson, and first proved by Joseph-Louis Lagrange.
Although Elizabeth II is the longest-reigning Queen of Canada, Louis XIV was the longest-reigning monarch over Canadian territory, clocking in at 72 years.
Female mallard ducks have twisted vaginas that make intromission by unwanted males difficult. The male penis spirals in a counterclockwise direction, while the female spirals in a clockwise direction.
A lowland Scots term, “widdershins”, means to move in a counterclockwise direction. The word is sometimes connected with bad luck. It was considered unlucky in Britain to travel in an anticlockwise (anti sun wise) direction around a church, and a number of folk myths reference this superstition, e.g. Childe Rowland, where the protagonist and his sister are transported to Elfland after his sister runs widdershins round a church.