We are surrounded by people’s names, celebrations of their lifelong contributions to the world of science and maths. Euler’s formula, Fermat’s last theorem, and the Higgs boson are all examples of key discoveries after the people who discovered them. But should the scientific community continue to do so?
Children’s literature as a genre is unique in that it is one of few whose audience defines it. Within the genre we find examples of fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction, but all fall under a single umbrella, united by the age of its readers. This complicates defining the genre, made even more complex by the fact that children are a moving target; they are not destined to remain children forever. As a result, children’s literature is one that can never be static; a new generation is constantly growing into it as another grows too old for it. As a result, the genre itself must adapt just as quickly to account for its changing demographic.
We all know the feeling, when when you want to insult a friend, but just don’t quite have the means to do so, or when you’re looking for a particularly creative insult but one just won’t come, and you stand there for a couple seconds looking dumbstruck.
Kissinger’s career, while marked with ground breaking diplomatic negotiation, was tainted with deep ethical controversies, such as the secret bombing campaigns in Cambodia and Laos, support for authoritarian regimes in Latin America, and the prolonging of the Vietnam war, and there are many more. This is why Kissinger is such a polarising figure; many people struggle to see the master diplomat and architect of horrific war crimes as the same man, often reducing his legacy to one extreme or the other in a simplification of a deeply nuanced politician.
If I told you that a fair democracy didn’t exist, what would you think? 96 of the world’s countries consider themselves a ‘democracy’, a voting system based on equality, where everyone has their say. In 1950, Kenneth Arrow published ‘Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem’, based on the controversial statement, ‘There is no such thing as a fair voting system’. So what is ‘Arrows Impossibility Theorem’ and why is it mathematically impossible to have a ‘fair’ democracy?
