Word: plato
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...knows whether Plato ever flipped anyone the bird - but he might have. People have been raising their middle finger to indicate something other than "Does this cuticle need trimming?" since the time of the ancient Greeks. Like democracy and feta cheese, it spread around the world...
Ever since Socrates banished us from his Republic, artists (and, as is my case, would-be artists) have had to justify their existence. Plato thought we were morally questionable and, sad to say, over the millennia, not much has changed. In England in the 17th century we were accused of decadence. In France in the 19th century we were accused of dissolution. In America, ever since the Puritans conquered the New World we’ve been caricatured again and again as indolent. So we have a bit of a bad rep. And unless you’re a rapper...
Elementary school classrooms are filled with impressionable young minds learning how to add, multiply, and divide; but few of these students will ever understand the logic and the theory behind their calculations. The works of Plato, Euclid, and Newton, upon which all of modern science and commerce depend, are as much philosophical statements about the structure of the universe as they are mathematical treatises. In “Is God a Mathematician?” Mario Livio attempts to impress upon the reader this fundamental connection between math and philosophy while presenting a “greatest hits?...
...Livio struggles to answer the fundamental question of whether mathematicians have “discovered” the universe’s laws or the laws of mathematics were “invented” by mathematicians. Reaching back to the sixth century B.C., Livio uses Pythagoras, Plato, and Archimedes to demonstrate that there is an intimate relationship between the most basic arithmetic and much more complicated and inaccessible abstract logic. Revelations abound, from the logical basis for counting, to the foundation of prime numbers, and the Pythagorean Theorem. But there are an equal number of instances where Livio?...
...Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power," declared Thomas Jefferson upon departing the presidency. At that point he could retreat to Monticello, read Plato in Greek, plan and plant his University of Virginia. "I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides," he wrote to John Adams, "and I find myself much the happier...