Word: greekness
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About 350 years ago, a French amateur mathematician named Pierre de Fermat scratched a devilishly tricky problem in the margin of a Greek mathematical text. Then he added, "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof ((of the theorem)), which this margin is too small to contain." Did he really have the answer? The attempts of generations of scientists to find out have made Fermat's Last Theorem the El Dorado of math problems. Now, at long last, an assistant professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University seems to have broken the code. Last month at Bonn's Max Planck Institute, Yoichi Miyaoka...
...fact that Bush has no recognizable heritage is no reason to rule out an "ethnic" candidate as the second choice on the Democratic ticket, but the pundits are already saying Dukakis the Greek is minority enough. The Democrats need a vice president who is non-ethnic and who is non-Harvard, which will be hard, considering everyone in the party fits one of those two catagories...
Such speculation goes even further. Experts have pondered the fact that Superman's original Kryptonian name, Kal-El, resembles Hebraic syllables | meaning "all that God is." Greek and Norse mythology have been invoked to show that Superman resembles a god who comes to earth and walks among men in mortal guise. Screenwriter Newman sees yet more exalted implications in the legend. "It begins with a father who lives up in heaven, who says, 'I will send my only son to save earth.' The son takes on the guise of a man but is not a man. The religious overtones...
...autobiography, Simon recalls her father's efforts to thwart her own intellectual curiosity. Here she writes with scarcely disguised bitterness of one promising Gonzaga daughter: "Her impressive knowledge of Virgil, every line, didn't matter, nor did her command of Greek, and so what if she could explain the propositions of Euclid? Her vocation was marriage...
...peculiarly powerful form of gravitas may arise out of suffering. It draws its authority not only from the redemptive example of Christ but also from Greek tragedy: the terrible moral power of woe. Mother Teresa has that gravitas of the redemptive. Whole cultures may be judged weighty or weightless by the calibration of suffering. Russian history sometimes seems an entire universe of gravitas: always there is the heavy Slavic woe, the encroaching dark and metaphysical winter...