Then you could read about Hypatia on pages 44-45 of my history of algebra. You could also cast an eye on Charles William Mitchell’s melodramatic (and to my eye, sexually ambiguous) painting of the lady’s last moments, in the photo well at the middle of the book.
One of my pitches has been that Unknown Quantity is the only algebra book to include a picture of a naked woman. Though again, it’s not totally clear to me that Mitchell had a woman in mind… Funny people, the Victorians.
(Charles Kingsley’s novel Hypatia was, by the way, a great favorite of Queen Victoria’s, and still reads well today. It was the inspiration for Mitchell’s painting.)
I could no comment on the Supreme Court post so am doing so here.
If Jews are higher IQ, why does Israel score 15th in a ranking of countries – behind mostly Asian and European countries.
http://www.iq-tests-for-the-high-range.com/statistics/iq_by_country.html
Unknown Quantity is the only algebra book to include a picture of a naked woman
That sort of study aid would have come in handy back in the day whilst slogging through polynomials and the rest. And really Hypatia’s not the worst sex symbol around–at least a few dozen IQ points above the usual starlet (and the heroic Hypatia probably has some appeal for the… ahem…sapphically-inclined)
One of my pitches has been that Unknown Quantity is the only algebra book to include a picture of a naked woman.
Beyond second-hand High School maths textbooks?
(You might be interested in this, John.)
>>If Jews are higher IQ, why does Israel score 15th in a ranking of countries – behind mostly Asian and European countries.
Good question!
Maybe we can find a nobel-prize winner to take a shot at answering this one.
In order to avoid a conflict of interest, we’ll have to find a non-Jewish nobel prize winner.
That’ll make it a littler harder…
Israel is a mixture of Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Mizrahim. Only the Ashkenazi population is thought to possess an elevated average IQ. Also, are those statistics based on Ravens progressive matrices? If so, the Ashkenazi advantage is in verbal rather than performance IQ. Of course, culture could also explain some of the reported difference in IQ if one believes the tests are susceptible to cultural and educational biases.
nebbish,
Perhaps we should continue this in the following post that discusses genetics?