Word: abstraction
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...crisis of governance is far from the abstract problem of an abstract bureaucracy. It will tangibly affect our education. It is difficult as a student to watch an administration refusing to trust the tenured faculty. And it is hard to learn when you do not know what, why, or how you are meant to be learning—but the closed-door curricular review has thus far come up with no guiding principles for what “education” means...
...second day at Harvard, we woke up to what most of us had only known as an abstract concept. In the morning hours of Sept. 11, terrorism became real. As we graduate this week, we are faced with a similarly silent threat. If unchecked, our destruction of our climate will deeply and intimately affect all of our lives. Yet many of us think of this menace in the same detached way we used to think of terrorism...
...exhibition's evocative landscape paintings. The Korean artists pay particular attention to the subjects in the foreground?mountains, plants, trees, rocks?leaving the background almost empty to maximize the feeling of depth and provide a sense of perspective that their Chinese counterparts often lack. The overall effect is both abstract and realistic...
...many others, I suspect--the lonely, introverted process of statistically quantifying my strength and stamina levels and comparing them to some abstract norm started a few years later, in fifth grade, when we were called to the playground to compete for the President's physical fitness certificate. The hidden purpose of this cold war--era program was, I presume, to transform the public schools into a vast network of junior boot camps. The criteria for obtaining the certificate were ominously unvarying and exact. If a child couldn't do a certain number of chin-ups or complete...
...Samuel Eilenberg of Columbia in 1945 which introduced category theory, a framework to show how mathematical structures relate to each other. This branch of algebra has since influenced most mathematical fields and also has functions in philosophy and linguistics, but was first dismissed by many practical mathematicians as too abstract to be useful...