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Alphabet.
In 886 AD, the Bulgarian Empire introduced the Glagolitic alphabet which was devised by the Saints Cyril and Methodius in the 850s. The Glagolitic alphabet was gradually superseded in later centuries by the Cyrillic script, developed around the Preslav Literary School, Bulgaria in the late 9th century.
Several Cyrillic alphabets with 28 to 44 letters were used in the beginning and the middle of the 19th century during the efforts on the codification of Modern Bulgarian until an alphabet with 32 letters, proposed by Marin Drinov, gained prominence in the 1870s. The alphabet of Marin Drinov was used until the orthographic reform of 1945, when the letters yat (uppercase Ѣ, lowercase ѣ) and big yus (uppercase Ѫ, lowercase ѫ) were removed from its alphabet, reducing the number of letters to 30.
With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union, following the Latin and Greek scripts.
Grammar.
The parts of speech in Bulgarian are divided in ten types, which are categorized in two broad classes: mutable and immutable. The difference is that mutable parts of speech vary grammatically, whereas the immutable ones do not change, regardless of their use. The five classes of mutables are: "nouns", "adjectives", "numerals", "pronouns" and "verbs". Syntactically, the first four of these form the group of the noun or the nominal group. The immutables are: "adverbs", "prepositions", "conjunctions", "particles" and "interjections". Verbs and adverbs form the group of the verb or the verbal group.
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Nominal morphology.
Nouns and adjectives have the categories grammatical gender, number, case (only vocative) and definiteness in Bulgarian. Adjectives and adjectival pronouns agree with nouns in number and gender. Pronouns have gender and number and retain (as in nearly all Indo-European languages) a more significant part of the case system.
Nominal inflection.
Gender.
There are three grammatical genders in Bulgarian: "masculine", "feminine" and "neuter". The gender of the noun can largely be inferred from its ending: nouns ending in a consonant ("zero ending") are generally masculine (for example, 'city', 'son', 'man'; those ending in –а/–я (-a/-ya) ( 'woman', 'daughter', 'street') are normally feminine; and nouns ending in –е, –о are almost always neuter ( 'child', 'lake'), as are those rare words (usually loanwords) that end in –и, –у, and –ю ( 'tsunami', 'taboo', 'menu'). Perhaps the most significant exception from the above are the relatively numerous nouns that end in a consonant and yet are feminine: these comprise, firstly, a large group of nouns with zero ending expressing quality, degree or an abstraction, including all nouns ending on –ост/–ест -{ost/est} ( 'wisdom', 'vileness', 'loveliness', 'sickness', 'love'), and secondly, a much smaller group of irregular nouns with zero ending which define tangible objects or concepts ( 'blood', 'bone', 'evening', 'night'). There are also some commonly used words that end in a vowel and yet are masculine: 'father', 'grandfather', / 'uncle', and others.
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The plural forms of the nouns do not express their gender as clearly as the singular ones, but may also provide some clues to it: the ending (-i) is more likely to be used with a masculine or feminine noun ( 'facts', 'sicknesses'), while one in belongs more often to a neuter noun ( 'lakes'). Also, the plural ending occurs only in masculine nouns.
Number.
Two numbers are distinguished in Bulgarian–singular and plural. A variety of plural suffixes is used, and the choice between them is partly determined by their ending in singular and partly influenced by gender; in addition, irregular declension and alternative plural forms are common. Words ending in (which are usually feminine) generally have the plural ending , upon dropping of the singular ending. Of nouns ending in a consonant, the feminine ones also use , whereas the masculine ones usually have for polysyllables and for monosyllables (however, exceptions are especially common in this group). Nouns ending in (most of which are neuter) mostly use the suffixes (both of which require the dropping of the singular endings) and .
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With cardinal numbers and related words such as ('several'), masculine nouns use a special count form in , which stems from the Proto-Slavonic dual: ('two/three chairs') versus ('these chairs'); cf. feminine ('two/three/these books') and neuter ('two/three/these beds'). However, a recently developed language norm requires that count forms should only be used with masculine nouns that do not denote persons. Thus, ('two/three students') is perceived as more correct than , while the distinction is retained in cases such as ('two/three pencils') versus ('these pencils').
Case.
Cases exist only in the personal and some other pronouns (as they do in many other modern Indo-European languages), with nominative, accusative, dative and vocative forms. Vestiges are present in a number of phraseological units and sayings. The major exception are vocative forms, which are still in use for masculine (with the endings -е, -о and -ю) and feminine nouns (-[ь/й]о and -е) in the singular.
Definiteness (article).
In modern Bulgarian, definiteness is expressed by a definite article which is postfixed to the noun, much like in the Scandinavian languages or Romanian (indefinite: , 'person'; definite: , ""the" person") or to the first nominal constituent of definite noun phrases (indefinite: , 'a good person'; definite: , ""the" good person"). There are four singular definite articles. Again, the choice between them is largely determined by the noun's ending in the singular. Nouns that end in a consonant and are masculine use –ът/–ят, when they are grammatical subjects, and –а/–я elsewhere. Nouns that end in a consonant and are feminine, as well as nouns that end in –а/–я (most of which are feminine, too) use –та. Nouns that end in –е/–о use –то.
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The plural definite article is –те for all nouns except for those whose plural form ends in –а/–я; these get –та instead. When postfixed to adjectives the definite articles are –ят/–я for masculine gender (again, with the longer form being reserved for grammatical subjects), –та for feminine gender, –то for neuter gender, and –те for plural.
Adjective and numeral inflection.
Both groups agree in gender and number with the noun they are appended to. They may also take the definite article as explained above.
Pronouns.
Pronouns may vary in gender, number, and definiteness, and are the only parts of speech that have retained case inflections. Three cases are exhibited by some groups of pronouns – nominative, accusative and dative. The distinguishable types of pronouns include the following: personal, relative, reflexive, interrogative, negative, indefinite, summative and possessive.
Verbal morphology and grammar.
A Bulgarian verb has many distinct forms, as it varies in person, number, voice, aspect, mood, tense and in some cases gender.
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Finite verbal forms.
Finite verbal forms are "simple" or "compound" and agree with subjects in person (first, second and third) and number (singular, plural). In addition to that, past compound forms using participles vary in gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and voice (active and passive) as well as aspect (perfective/aorist and imperfective).
Aspect.
Bulgarian verbs express lexical aspect: perfective verbs signify the completion of the action of the verb and form past perfective (aorist) forms; imperfective ones are neutral with regard to it and form past imperfective forms. Most Bulgarian verbs can be grouped in perfective-imperfective pairs (imperfective/perfective: "come", "arrive"). Perfective verbs can be usually formed from imperfective ones by suffixation or prefixation, but the resultant verb often deviates in meaning from the original. In the pair examples above, aspect is stem-specific and therefore there is no difference in meaning.
In Bulgarian, there is also grammatical aspect. Three grammatical aspects are distinguishable: neutral, perfect and pluperfect. The neutral aspect comprises the three simple tenses and the future tense. The pluperfect is manifest in tenses that use double or triple auxiliary "be" participles like the past pluperfect subjunctive. Perfect constructions use a single auxiliary "be".
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Mood.
The traditional interpretation is that in addition to the four moods (наклонения ) shared by most other European languages – indicative (изявително, ) imperative (повелително ), subjunctive ( ) and conditional (условно, ) – in Bulgarian there is one more to describe a general category of unwitnessed events – the inferential (преизказно ) mood. However, most contemporary Bulgarian linguists usually exclude the subjunctive mood and the inferential mood from the list of Bulgarian moods (thus placing the number of Bulgarian moods at a total of 3: indicative, imperative and conditional) and do not consider them to be moods but view them as verbial morphosyntactic constructs or separate gramemes of the verb class. The possible existence of a few other moods has been discussed in the literature. Most Bulgarian school grammars teach the traditional view of 4 Bulgarian moods (as described above, but excluding the subjunctive and including the inferential).
Tense.
There are three grammatically distinctive positions in time – present, past and future – which combine with aspect and mood to produce a number of formations. Normally, in grammar books these formations are viewed as separate tenses – i. e. "past imperfect" would mean that the verb is in past tense, in the imperfective aspect, and in the indicative mood (since no other mood is shown). There are more than 40 different tenses across Bulgarian's two aspects and five moods.
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In the indicative mood, there are three simple tenses:
In the indicative there are also the following compound tenses:
The four perfect constructions above can vary in aspect depending on the aspect of the main-verb participle; they are in fact pairs of imperfective and perfective aspects. Verbs in forms using past participles also vary in voice and gender.
There is only one simple tense in the imperative mood, the present, and there are simple forms only for the second-person singular, -и/-й (-i, -y/i), and plural, -ете/-йте (-ete, -yte), e.g. уча ('to study'): , sg., , pl.; 'to play': , . There are compound imperative forms for all persons and numbers in the present compound imperative (, ), the present perfect compound imperative (, ) and the rarely used present pluperfect compound imperative (, ).
The conditional mood consists of five compound tenses, most of which are not grammatically distinguishable. The present, future and past conditional use a special past form of the stem би- (bi – "be") and the past participle (, , 'I would study'). The past future conditional and the past future perfect conditional coincide in form with the respective indicative tenses.
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The subjunctive mood is rarely documented as a separate verb form in Bulgarian, (being, morphologically, a sub-instance of the quasi-infinitive construction with the particle да and a normal finite verb form), but nevertheless it is used regularly. The most common form, often mistaken for the present tense, is the present subjunctive ( , 'I had better go'). The difference between the present indicative and the present subjunctive tense is that the subjunctive can be formed by "both" perfective and imperfective verbs. It has completely replaced the infinitive and the supine from complex expressions (see below). It is also employed to express opinion about "possible" future events. The past perfect subjunctive ( , 'I'd had better be gone') refers to "possible" events in the past, which "did not" take place, and the present pluperfect subjunctive ( ), which may be used about both past and future events arousing feelings of incontinence, suspicion, etc.
The inferential mood has five pure tenses. Two of them are simple – "past aorist inferential" and "past imperfect inferential" – and are formed by the past participles of perfective and imperfective verbs, respectively. There are also three compound tenses – "past future inferential", "past future perfect inferential" and "past perfect inferential". All these tenses' forms are gender-specific in the singular. There are also conditional and compound-imperative crossovers. The existence of inferential forms has been attributed to Turkic influences by most Bulgarian linguists. Morphologically, they are derived from the perfect.
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Non-finite verbal forms.
Bulgarian has the following participles:
The participles are inflected by gender, number, and definiteness, and are coordinated with the subject when forming compound tenses (see tenses above). When used in an attributive role, the inflection attributes are coordinated with the noun that is being attributed.
Reflexive verbs.
Bulgarian uses reflexive verbal forms (i.e. actions which are performed by the agent onto him- or herself) which behave in a similar way as they do in many other Indo-European languages, such as French and Spanish. The reflexive is expressed by the invariable particle se, originally a clitic form of the accusative reflexive pronoun. Thus –
When the action is performed on others, other particles are used, just like in any normal verb, e.g. –
Sometimes, the reflexive verb form has a similar but not necessarily identical meaning to the non-reflexive verb –
In other cases, the reflexive verb has a completely different meaning from its non-reflexive counterpart –
When the action is performed on an indirect object, the particles change to si and its derivatives –
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In some cases, the particle "si" is ambiguous between the indirect object and the possessive meaning –
The difference between transitive and intransitive verbs can lead to significant differences in meaning with minimal change, e.g. –
The particle "si" is often used to indicate a more personal relationship to the action, e.g. –
Adverbs.
The most productive way to form adverbs is to derive them from the neuter singular form of the corresponding adjective—e.g. (fast), (hard), (strange)—but adjectives ending in use the masculine singular form (i.e. ending in ), instead—e.g. (heroically), (bravely, like a man), (skillfully). The same pattern is used to form adverbs from the (adjective-like) ordinal numerals, e.g. (firstly), (secondly), (thirdly), and in some cases from (adjective-like) cardinal numerals, e.g. (twice as/double), (three times as), (five times as).
The remaining adverbs are formed in ways that are no longer productive in the language. A small number are original (not derived from other words), for example: (here), (there), (inside), (outside), (very/much) etc. The rest are mostly fossilized case forms, such as:
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Adverbs can sometimes be reduplicated to emphasize the qualitative or quantitative properties of actions, moods or relations as performed by the subject of the sentence: "" ("rather slowly"), "" ("with great difficulty"), "" ("quite", "thoroughly").
Other features.
Questions.
Questions in Bulgarian which do not use a question word (such as who? what? etc.) are formed with the particle after the verb; a subject is not necessary, as the verbal conjugation suggests who is performing the action:
While the particle generally goes after the verb, it can go after a noun or adjective if a contrast is needed:
A verb is not always necessary, e.g. when presenting a choice:
Rhetorical questions can be formed by adding to a question word, thus forming a "double interrogative" –
The same construction ('no') is an emphasized positive –
Significant verbs.
Be ("Съм").
The verb – 'to be' is also used as an auxiliary for forming the perfect, the passive and the conditional:
Two alternate forms of exist:
Will ("Ще").
The impersonal verb () is used to for forming the (positive) future tense:
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The negative future is formed with the invariable construction (see below):
The past tense of this verb – щях is conjugated to form the past conditional ('would have' – again, with да, since it is "irrealis"):
Have/Don't have ("Имам and нямам").
The verbs ('to have') and ('to not have'):
Conjunctions and particles.
But.
In Bulgarian, there are several conjunctions all translating into English as "but", which are all used in distinct situations. They are (), (), (), (), and () (and () – "however", identical in use to ).
While there is some overlapping between their uses, in many cases they are specific. For example, is used for a choice – – "not this one, but that one" (compare Spanish ), while is often used to provide extra information or an opinion – – "I said it, but I was wrong". Meanwhile, provides contrast between two situations, and in some sentences can even be translated as "although", "while" or even "and" – – "I'm working, and he's daydreaming".
Very often, different words can be used to alter the emphasis of a sentence – e.g. while and both mean "I smoke, but I shouldn't", the first sounds more like a statement of fact ("...but I mustn't"), while the second feels more like a "judgement" ("...but I oughtn't"). Similarly, and both mean "I don't want to, but he does", however the first emphasizes the fact that "he" wants to, while the second emphasizes the "wanting" rather than the person.
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is interesting in that, while it feels archaic, it is often used in poetry and frequently in children's stories, since it has quite a moral/ominous feel to it.
Some common expressions use these words, and some can be used alone as interjections:
Vocative particles.
Bulgarian has several abstract particles which are used to strengthen a statement. These have no precise translation in English. The particles are strictly informal and can even be considered rude by some people and in some situations. They are mostly used at the end of questions or instructions.
Modal particles.
These are "tagged" on to the beginning or end of a sentence to express the mood of the speaker in relation to the situation. They are mostly interrogative or slightly imperative in nature. There is no change in the grammatical mood when these are used (although they may be expressed through different grammatical moods in other languages).
Intentional particles.
These express intent or desire, perhaps even pleading. They can be seen as a sort of cohortative side to the language. (Since they can be used by themselves, they could even be considered as verbs in their own right.) They are also highly informal.
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These particles can be combined with the vocative particles for greater effect, e.g. (let me see), or even exclusively in combinations with them, with no other elements, e.g. (come on!); (I told you not to!).
Pronouns of quality.
Bulgarian has several pronouns of quality which have no direct parallels in English – (what sort of); (this sort of); (that sort of – colloq.); (some sort of); (no sort of); (every sort of); and the relative pronoun (the sort of ... that ... ). The adjective ("the same") derives from the same radical.
Example phrases include:
An interesting phenomenon is that these can be strung along one after another in quite long constructions, e.g.
An extreme, albeit colloquial, example with almost no intrinsic lexical meaning – yet which is meaningful to the Bulgarian ear – would be :
The subject of the sentence is simply the pronoun "" (lit. "this one here"; colloq. "she").
Another interesting phenomenon that is observed in colloquial speech is the use of (neuter of ) not only as a substitute for an adjective, but also as a substitute for a verb. In that case the base form is used as the third person singular in the present indicative and all other forms are formed by analogy to other verbs in the language. Sometimes the "verb" may even acquire a derivational prefix that changes its meaning. Examples:
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Another use of in colloquial speech is the word , which can be used as a substitution for a noun, but also, if the speaker does not remember or is not sure how to say something, they might say and then pause to think about it:
As a result of this versatility, the word can readily be used as a euphemism for taboo subjects. It is commonly used to substitute, for example, words relating to reproductive organs or sexual acts:
Similar "meaningless" expressions are extremely common in spoken Bulgarian, especially when the speaker is finding it difficult to describe or express something.
Syntax.
Bulgarian employs clitic doubling, mostly for emphatic purposes. For example, the following constructions are common in colloquial Bulgarian:
The phenomenon is practically obligatory in the spoken language in the case of inversion signalling information structure (in writing, clitic doubling may be skipped in such instances, with a somewhat bookish effect):
Sometimes, the doubling signals syntactic relations, thus:
This is contrasted with:
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In this case, clitic doubling can be a colloquial alternative of the more formal or bookish passive voice, which would be constructed as follows:
Clitic doubling is also fully obligatory, both in the spoken and in the written norm, in clauses including several special expressions that use the short accusative and dative pronouns such as "" (I feel like playing), студено ми е (I am cold), and боли ме ръката (my arm hurts):
Except the above examples, clitic doubling is considered inappropriate in a formal context.
Vocabulary.
Most of the vocabulary of modern Bulgarian consists of terms inherited from Proto-Slavic and local Bulgarian innovations and formations of those through the mediation of Old and Middle Bulgarian. The native terms in Bulgarian account for 70% to 80% of the lexicon.
The remaining 20% to 30% are loanwords from a number of languages, as well as derivations of such words. Bulgarian adopted also a few words of Thracian and Bulgar origin. The languages which have contributed most to Bulgarian as a way of foreign vocabulary borrowings are:
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The classical languages Latin and Greek are the source of many words, used mostly in international terminology. Many Latin terms entered Bulgarian during the time when present-day Bulgaria was part of the Roman Empire and also in the later centuries through Romanian, Aromanian, and Megleno-Romanian during Bulgarian Empires. The loanwords of Greek origin in Bulgarian are a product of the influence of the liturgical language of the Orthodox Church. Many of the numerous loanwords from another Turkic language, Ottoman Turkish and, via Ottoman Turkish, from Arabic were adopted into Bulgarian during the long period of Ottoman rule, but have been replaced with native Bulgarian terms. Furthermore, after the independence of Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire in 1878, Bulgarian intellectuals imported many French language vocabulary. In addition, both specialized (usually coming from the field of science) and commonplace English words (notably abstract, commodity/service-related or technical terms) have also penetrated Bulgarian since the second half of the 20th century, especially since 1989. A noteworthy portion of this English-derived terminology has attained some unique features in the process of its introduction to native speakers, and this has resulted in peculiar derivations that set the newly formed loanwords apart from the original words (mainly in pronunciation), although many loanwords are completely identical to the source words. A growing number of international neologisms are also being widely adopted, causing controversy between younger generations who, in general, are raised in the era of digital globalization, and the older, more conservative educated purists.
Sample text.
Article 1 of the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" in Bulgarian:
The romanization of the text into Latin alphabet:
Bulgarian pronunciation transliterated in broad IPA:
Article 1 of the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" in English:
External links.
Linguistic reports
Dictionaries
Courses |
Bipyramid
In geometry, a bipyramid, dipyramid, or double pyramid is a polyhedron formed by fusing two pyramids together base-to-base. The polygonal base of each pyramid must therefore be the same, and unless otherwise specified the base vertices are usually coplanar and a bipyramid is usually "symmetric", meaning the two pyramids are mirror images across their common base plane. When each apex (, the off-base vertices) of the bipyramid is on a line perpendicular to the base and passing through its center, it is a "right" bipyramid; otherwise it is "oblique". When the base is a regular polygon, the bipyramid is also called "regular".
Definition and properties.
A bipyramid is a polyhedron constructed by fusing two pyramids which share the same polygonal base; a pyramid is in turn constructed by connecting each vertex of its base to a single new vertex (the apex) not lying in the plane of the base, for an gonal base forming triangular faces in addition to the base face. An gonal bipyramid thus has faces, edges, and vertices. More generally, a right pyramid is a pyramid where the apices are on the perpendicular line through the centroid of an arbitrary polygon or the incenter of a tangential polygon, depending on the source. Likewise, a "right bipyramid" is a polyhedron constructed by attaching two symmetrical right bipyramid bases; bipyramids whose apices are not on this line are called "oblique bipyramids".
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When the two pyramids are mirror images, the bipyramid is called "symmetric". It is called "regular" if its base is a regular polygon. When the base is a regular polygon and the apices are on the perpendicular line through its center (a "regular right bipyramid") then all of its faces are isosceles triangles; sometimes the name "bipyramid" refers specifically to symmetric regular right bipyramids, Examples of such bipyramids are the triangular bipyramid, octahedron (square bipyramid) and pentagonal bipyramid. If all their edges are equal in length, these shapes consist of equilateral triangle faces, making them deltahedra; the triangular bipyramid and the pentagonal bipyramid are Johnson solids, and the regular octahedron is a Platonic solid.
The symmetric regular right bipyramids have prismatic symmetry, with dihedral symmetry group of order : they are unchanged when rotated of a turn around the axis of symmetry, reflected across any plane passing through both apices and a base vertex or both apices and the center of a base edge, or reflected across the mirror plane. Because their faces are transitive under these symmetry transformations, they are isohedral. They are the dual polyhedra of prisms and the prisms are the dual of bipyramids as well; the bipyramids vertices correspond to the faces of the prism, and the edges between pairs of vertices of one correspond to the edges between pairs of faces of the other, and vice versa. The prisms share the same symmetry as the bipyramids. The regular octahedron is more symmetric still, as its base vertices and apices are indistinguishable and can be exchanged by reflections or rotations; the regular octahedron and its dual, the cube, have octahedral symmetry.
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The volume of a symmetric bipyramid is
formula_1
where is the area of the base and the perpendicular distance from the base plane to either apex. In the case of a regular sided polygon with side length and whose altitude is , the volume of such a bipyramid is:
formula_2
Related and other types of bipyramid.
Concave bipyramids.
A "concave bipyramid" has a concave polygon base, and one example is a concave tetragonal bipyramid or an irregular concave octahedron. A bipyramid with an arbitrary polygonal base could be considered a "right" bipyramid if the apices are on a line perpendicular to the base passing through the base's centroid.
Asymmetric bipyramids.
An "asymmetric bipyramid" has apices which are not mirrored across the base plane; for a right bipyramid this only happens if each apex is a different distance from the base.
The dual of an asymmetric right -gonal bipyramid is an -gonal frustum.
A regular asymmetric right -gonal bipyramid has symmetry group , of order .
Scalene triangle bipyramids.
An isotoxal right (symmetric) di--gonal bipyramid is a right (symmetric) -gonal bipyramid with an "isotoxal" flat polygon base: its basal vertices are coplanar, but alternate in two radii.
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All its faces are congruent scalene triangles, and it is isohedral. It can be seen as another type of a right symmetric di--gonal "scalenohedron", with an isotoxal flat polygon base.
An isotoxal right (symmetric) di--gonal bipyramid has two-fold rotation axes through opposite basal vertices, reflection planes through opposite apical edges, an -fold rotation axis through apices, a reflection plane through base, and an -fold rotation-reflection axis through apices, representing symmetry group of order . (The reflection about the base plane corresponds to the rotation-reflection. If is even, then there is an inversion symmetry about the center, corresponding to the rotation-reflection.)
Example with :
Example with :
Double example:
In crystallography, isotoxal right (symmetric) didigonal (8-faced), ditrigonal (12-faced), ditetragonal (16-faced), and dihexagonal (24-faced) bipyramids exist.
Scalenohedra.
A scalenohedron is similar to a bipyramid; the difference is that the scalenohedra has a zig-zag pattern in the middle edges.
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It has two apices and basal vertices, faces, and edges; it is topologically identical to a -gonal bipyramid, but its basal vertices alternate in two rings above and below the center.
All its faces are congruent scalene triangles, and it is isohedral. It can be seen as another type of a right symmetric di--gonal bipyramid, with a regular zigzag skew polygon base.
A regular right symmetric di--gonal scalenohedron has two-fold rotation axes through opposite basal mid-edges, reflection planes through opposite apical edges, an -fold rotation axis through apices, and a -fold rotation-reflection axis through apices (about which rotations-reflections globally preserve the solid), representing symmetry group of order . (If is odd, then there is an inversion symmetry about the center, corresponding to the rotation-reflection.)
Example with :
Example with :
For at most two particular values of formula_11 the faces of such a scalenohedron may be isosceles.
Double example:
In crystallography, regular right symmetric didigonal (-faced) and ditrigonal (-faced) scalenohedra exist.
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The smallest geometric scalenohedra have eight faces, and are topologically identical to the regular octahedron. In this case (), in crystallography, a regular right symmetric didigonal (-faced) scalenohedron is called a "tetragonal scalenohedron".
Let us temporarily focus on the regular right symmetric -faced scalenohedra with i.e.
formula_20
Their two apices can be represented as and their four basal vertices as :
formula_21
where is a parameter between and .
At , it is a regular octahedron; at , it has four pairs of coplanar faces, and merging these into four congruent isosceles triangles makes it a disphenoid; for , it is concave.
If the -gon base is both isotoxal in-out and zigzag skew, then not all faces of the isotoxal right symmetric scalenohedron are congruent.
Example with five different edge lengths:
For some particular values of , half the faces of such a scalenohedron may be isosceles or equilateral.
Example with three different edge lengths:
Star bipyramids.
A "star" bipyramid has a star polygon base, and is self-intersecting.
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A regular right symmetric star bipyramid has congruent isosceles triangle faces, and is isohedral.
A -bipyramid has Coxeter diagram .
4-polytopes with bipyramidal cells.
The dual of the rectification of each convex regular 4-polytopes is a cell-transitive 4-polytope with bipyramidal cells. In the following:
The bipyramid 4-polytope will have vertices where the apices of bipyramids meet. It will have vertices where the type vertices of bipyramids meet.
As cells must fit around an edge,
formula_30
Other dimensions.
A generalized -dimensional "bipyramid" is any -polytope constructed from an -polytope "base" lying in a hyperplane, with every base vertex connected by an edge to two "apex" vertices. If the -polytope is a regular polytope and the apices are equidistant from its center along the line perpendicular to the base hyperplane, it will have identical pyramidal facets.
A 2-dimensional analog of a right symmetric bipyramid is formed by joining two congruent isosceles triangles base-to-base to form a rhombus. More generally, a kite is a 2-dimensional analog of a (possibly asymmetric) right bipyramid, and any quadrilateral is a 2-dimensional analog of a general bipyramid. |
Brown University
Brown University is a private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. It is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the US, founded in 1764 as the "College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations". One of nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution, it was the first US college to codify that admission and instruction of students was to be equal regardless of the religious affiliation of students.
The university is home to the oldest applied mathematics program in the country and oldest engineering program in the Ivy League. It was one of the early doctoral-granting institutions in the U.S., adding masters and doctoral studies in 1887. In 1969, it adopted its Open Curriculum after student lobbying, which eliminated mandatory general education distribution requirements. In 1971, Brown's coordinate women's institution, Pembroke College, was fully merged into the university.
The university comprises the College, the Graduate School, Alpert Medical School, the School of Engineering, the School of Public Health and the School of Professional Studies. Its international programs are organized through the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, and it is academically affiliated with the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Rhode Island School of Design, which offers undergraduate and graduate dual degree programs. Brown's main campus is in the College Hill neighborhood of Providence. The university is surrounded by a federally listed architectural district with a concentration of Colonial-era buildings. Benefit Street has one of America's richest concentrations of 17th- and 18th-century architecture. Undergraduate admissions are among the most selective in the country, with an acceptance rate of 5% for the class of 2026.
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, 11 Nobel Prize winners, 1 Fields Medalist, 7 National Humanities Medalists, and 11 National Medal of Science laureates have been affiliated with Brown as alumni, faculty, or researchers. Alumni also include 27 Pulitzer Prize winners, 21 billionaires, 4 U.S. Secretaries of State, over 100 members of the United States Congress, 58 Rhodes Scholars, 22 MacArthur Genius Fellows, and 38 Olympic medalists.
History.
Foundation and charter.
In 1761, three residents of Newport, Rhode Island, drafted a petition to the colony's General Assembly:
The three petitioners were Ezra Stiles, pastor of Newport's Second Congregational Church and future president of Yale University; William Ellery Jr., future signer of the United States Declaration of Independence; and Josias Lyndon, future governor of the colony. Stiles and Ellery later served as co-authors of the college's charter two years later. The editor of Stiles's papers observes, "This draft of a petition connects itself with other evidence of Dr. Stiles's project for a Collegiate Institution in Rhode Island, before the charter of what became Brown University."
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The Philadelphia Association of Baptist Churches was also interested in establishing a college in Rhode Island, which was home of the mother church of their denomination. At the time, the Baptists were unrepresented among the colonial colleges; the Congregationalists had Harvard University and Yale University, the Presbyterians had the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University, and the Episcopalians had the College of William & Mary and King's College, which later became Columbia University. The local University of Pennsylvania in their native Philadelphia was founded by Benjamin Franklin without direct association with any particular denomination. Isaac Backus, a historian of the New England Baptists and an inaugural trustee of Brown, wrote of the October 1762 resolution taken at Philadelphia:
James Manning arrived at Newport in July 1763 and was introduced to Stiles, who agreed to write the charter for the college. Stiles' first draft was read to the General Assembly in August 1763, and rejected by Baptist members who worried that their denomination would be underrepresented in the College Board of Fellows. A revised charter written by Stiles and Ellery was adopted by the Rhode Island General Assembly on March 3, 1764, in East Greenwich.
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In September 1764, the inaugural meeting of the corporation—the college's governing body—was held in Newport's Old Colony House. Governor Stephen Hopkins was chosen chancellor, former and future governor Samuel Ward vice chancellor, John Tillinghast treasurer, and Thomas Eyres secretary. The charter stipulated that the board of trustees should be composed of 22 Baptists, five Quakers, five Episcopalians, and four Congregationalists. Of the 12 Fellows, eight should be Baptists—including the college president—"and the rest indifferently of any or all Denominations."
At the time of its creation, Brown's charter was a uniquely progressive document. Other colleges had curricular strictures against opposing doctrines, while Brown's charter asserted, "Sectarian differences of opinions, shall not make any Part of the Public and Classical Instruction." The document additionally "recognized more broadly and fundamentally than any other [university charter] the principle of denominational cooperation." The oft-repeated statement that Brown's charter alone prohibited a religious test for College membership is inaccurate; other college charters were similarly liberal in that particular.
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The college was founded as Rhode Island College, at the site of the First Baptist Church in Warren, Rhode Island. Manning was sworn in as the college's first president in 1765 and remained in the role until 1791. In 1766, the college authorized the Reverend Morgan Edwards to travel to Europe to "solicit Benefactions for this Institution". During his year-and-a-half stay in the British Isles, Edwards secured funding from benefactors including Thomas Penn and Benjamin Franklin.
In 1770, the college moved from Warren to Providence. To establish a campus, John and Moses Brown purchased a four-acre lot on the crest of College Hill on behalf of the school. The majority of the property fell within the bounds of the original home lot of Chad Brown, an ancestor of the Browns and one of the original proprietors of Providence Plantations. After the college was relocated to the city, work began on constructing its first building.
A building committee, organized by the corporation, developed plans for the college's first purpose-built edifice, finalizing a design on February 9, 1770. The subsequent structure, referred to as "The College Edifice" and later as University Hall, may have been modeled on Nassau Hall, built 14 years prior at the College of New Jersey. President Manning, an active member of the building process, was educated at Princeton and might have suggested that Brown's first building resemble that of his alma mater.
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Brown family.
Nicholas Brown, John Brown, Joseph Brown, and Moses Brown were instrumental in moving the college to Providence, constructing its first building, and securing its endowment. Joseph became a professor of natural philosophy at the college; John served as its treasurer from 1775 to 1796; and Nicholas Sr's son Nicholas Brown Jr. succeeded his uncle as treasurer from 1796 to 1825.
On September 8, 1803, the corporation voted, "That the donation of $5,000, if made to this College within one Year from the late Commencement, shall entitle the donor to name the College." The following year, the appeal was answered by College Treasurer Nicholas Brown Jr. In a letter dated September 6, 1804, Brown committed "a donation of Five Thousand Dollars to Rhode Island College, to remain in perpetuity as a fund for the establishment of a Professorship of Oratory and Belles Letters." In recognition of the gift, the corporation on the same day voted, "That this College be called and known in all future time by the Name of Brown University." Over the years, the benefactions of Nicholas Brown Jr., totaled nearly $160,000 and included funds for building Hope College (1821–22) and Manning Hall (1834–35).
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In 1904, the John Carter Brown Library was established as an independently funded research library on Brown's campus; the library's collection was founded on that of John Carter Brown, son of Nicholas Brown Jr.
The Brown family was involved in various business ventures in Rhode Island, and accrued wealth both directly and indirectly from the transatlantic slave trade. The family was divided on the issue of slavery. John Brown had defended slavery, while Moses and Nicholas Brown Jr. were fervent abolitionists.
In 2003, under the tenure of President Ruth Simmons, the university established a steering committee to investigate these ties of the university to slavery and recommend a strategy to address them.
American Revolution.
With British vessels patrolling Narragansett Bay in the fall of 1776, the college library was moved out of Providence for safekeeping. During the subsequent American Revolutionary War, Brown's University Hall was used to house French and other revolutionary troops led by General George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau as they waited to commence the march of 1781 that led to the Siege of Yorktown and the Battle of the Chesapeake. This has been celebrated as marking the defeat of the British and the end of the war. The building functioned as barracks and hospital from December 10, 1776, to April 20, 1780, and as a hospital for French troops from June 26, 1780, to May 27, 1782.
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A number of Brown's founders and alumni played roles in the American Revolution and subsequent founding of the United States. Brown's first chancellor, Stephen Hopkins, served as a delegate to the Colonial Congress in Albany in 1754, and to the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1776. James Manning represented Rhode Island at the Congress of the Confederation, while concurrently serving as Brown's first president. Two of Brown's founders, William Ellery and Stephen Hopkins signed the Declaration of Independence.
James Mitchell Varnum, who graduated from Brown with honors in 1769, served as one of General George Washington's Continental Army brigadier generals and later as major general in command of the entire Rhode Island militia. Varnum is noted as the founder and commander of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, widely regarded as the first Black battalion in U.S. military history. David Howell, who graduated with an A.M. in 1769, served as a delegate to the Continental Congress from 1782 to 1785.
Presidents.
Nineteen individuals have served as presidents of the university since its founding in 1764. Since 2012, Christina Hull Paxson has served as president. Paxson had previously served as dean of Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs and chair of Princeton's economics department. Paxson's immediate predecessor, Ruth Simmons, is noted as the first African American president of an Ivy League institution. Other presidents of note include academic, Vartan Gregorian; and philosopher and economist, Francis Wayland.
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New Curriculum.
In 1966, the first Group Independent Study Project (GISP) at Brown was formed, involving 80 students and 15 professors. The GISP was inspired by student-initiated experimental schools, especially San Francisco State College, and sought ways to "put students at the center of their education" and "teach students how to think rather than just teaching facts".
Members of the GISP, Ira Magaziner and Elliot Maxwell published a paper of their findings titled, "Draft of a Working Paper for Education at Brown University." The paper made proposals for a new curriculum, including interdisciplinary freshman-year courses that would introduce "modes of thought," with instruction from faculty from different disciplines as well as for an end to letter grades. The following year Magaziner began organizing the student body to press for the reforms, organizing discussions and protests.
In 1968, university president Ray Heffner established a Special Committee on Curricular Philosophy. Composed of administrators, the committee was tasked with developing specific reforms and producing recommendations. A report, produced by the committee, was presented to the faculty, which voted the New Curriculum into existence on May 7, 1969. Its key features included:
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The Modes of Thought course was discontinued early on, but the other elements remain in place. In 2006, the reintroduction of plus/minus grading was proposed in response to concerns regarding grade inflation. The idea was rejected by the College Curriculum Council after canvassing alumni, faculty, and students, including the original authors of the Magaziner-Maxwell Report.
"Slavery and Justice" report.
In 2003, then-university president Ruth Simmons launched a steering committee to research Brown's eighteenth-century ties to slavery. In October 2006, the committee released a report documenting its findings.
Titled "Slavery and Justice", the document detailed the ways in which the university benefited both directly and indirectly from the transatlantic slave trade and the labor of enslaved people. The report also included seven recommendations for how the university should address this legacy. Brown has since completed a number of these recommendations including the establishment of its Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, the construction of its "Slavery Memorial", and the funding of a $10 million permanent endowment for Providence Public Schools.
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The "Slavery and Justice" report marked the first major effort by an American university to address its ties to slavery and prompted other institutions to undertake similar processes.
Coat of arms.
Brown's coat of arms was created in 1834. The prior year, president Francis Wayland had commissioned a committee to update the school's original seal to match the name the university had adopted in 1804. Central in the coat of arms is a white escutcheon divided into four sectors by a red cross. Within each sector of the coat of arms lies an open book. Above the shield is a crest consisting of the upper half of a sun in splendor among the clouds atop a red and white torse.
Campus.
Brown is the largest institutional landowner in Providence, with properties on College Hill and in the Jewelry District. The university was built contemporaneously with the eighteenth and nineteenth-century precincts surrounding it, making Brown's campus tightly integrated into Providence's urban fabric. Among the noted architects who have shaped Brown's campus are McKim, Mead & White, Philip Johnson, Rafael Viñoly, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Robert A. M. Stern.
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Main campus.
Brown's main campus, comprises 235 buildings and in the East Side neighborhood of College Hill. The university's central campus sits on a block bounded by Waterman, Prospect, George, and Thayer Streets; newer buildings extend northward, eastward, and southward. Brown's core, historic campus, constructed primary between 1770 and 1926, is defined by three greens: the Front or Quiet Green, the Middle or College Green, and the Ruth J. Simmons Quadrangle (historically known as Lincoln Field). A brick and wrought-iron fence punctuated by decorative gates and arches traces the block's perimeter. This section of campus is primarily Georgian and Richardsonian Romanesque in its architectural character.
To the south of the central campus are academic buildings and residential quadrangles, including Wriston, Keeney, and Gregorian quadrangles. Immediately to the east of the campus core sit Sciences Park and Brown's School of Engineering. North of the central campus are performing and visual arts facilities, life sciences labs, and the Pembroke Campus, which houses both dormitories and academic buildings. Facing the western edge of the central campus sit two of the Brown's seven libraries, the John Hay Library and the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library.
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The university's campus is contiguous with that of the Rhode Island School of Design, which is located immediately to Brown's west, along the slope of College Hill.
Van Wickle Gates.
Built in 1901, the Van Wickle Gates are a set of wrought iron gates that stand at the western edge of Brown's campus. The larger main gate is flanked by two smaller side gates. At Convocation the central gate opens inward to admit the procession of new students; at Commencement, the gate opens outward for the procession of graduates. A Brown superstition holds that students who walk through the central gate a second time prematurely will not graduate, although walking backward is said to cancel the hex.
John Hay Library.
The John Hay Library is the second oldest library on campus. Opened in 1910, the library is named for John Hay (class of 1858), private secretary to Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. The construction of the building was funded in large part by Hay's friend, Andrew Carnegie, who contributed half of the $300,000 cost of construction.
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The John Hay Library serves as the repository of the university's archives, rare books and manuscripts, and special collections. Noteworthy among the latter are the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection (described as "the foremost American collection of material devoted to the history and iconography of soldiers and soldiering"), the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays (described as "the largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind in any research library"), the Lownes Collection of the History of Science (described as "one of the three most important private collections of books of science in America"), and the papers of H. P. Lovecraft. The Hay Library is home to one of the broadest collections of incunabula in the Americas, one of Brown's two Shakespeare First Folios, the manuscript of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," and three books bound in human skin.
John Carter Brown Library.
Founded in 1846, the John Carter Brown Library is generally regarded as the world's leading collection of primary historical sources relating to the exploration and colonization of the Americas. While administered and funded separately from the university, the library has been owned by Brown and located on its campus since 1904.
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The library contains the best preserved of the eleven surviving copies of the Bay Psalm Book—the earliest extant book printed in British North America and the most expensive printed book in the world. Other holdings include a Shakespeare First Folio and the world's largest collection of 16th-century Mexican texts.
Haffenreffer Museum.
The exhibition galleries of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown's teaching museum, are located in Manning Hall on the campus's main green. Its one million artifacts, available for research and educational purposes, are located at its Collections Research Center in Bristol, Rhode Island. The museum's goal is to inspire creative and critical thinking about culture by fostering an interdisciplinary understanding of the material world. It provides opportunities for faculty and students to work with collections and the public, teaching through objects and programs in classrooms and exhibitions. The museum sponsors lectures and events in all areas of anthropology and also runs an extensive program of outreach to local schools.
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Annmary Brown Memorial.
The Annmary Brown Memorial was constructed from 1903 to 1907 by the politician, Civil War veteran, and book collector General Rush Hawkins, as a mausoleum for his wife, Annmary Brown, a member of the Brown family. In addition to its crypt—the final repository for Brown and Hawkins—the Memorial includes works of art from Hawkins's private collection, including paintings by Angelica Kauffman, Peter Paul Rubens, Gilbert Stuart, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Benjamin West, and Eastman Johnson, among others. His collection of over 450 incunabula was relocated to the John Hay Library in 1990. Today the Memorial is home to Brown's Medieval Studies and Renaissance Studies programs.
The Walk.
The Walk, a landscaped pedestrian corridor, connects the Pembroke Campus to the main campus. It runs parallel to Thayer Street and serves as a primary axis of campus, extending from Ruth Simmons Quadrangle at its southern terminus to the Meeting Street entrance to the Pembroke Campus at its northern end. The walk is bordered by departmental buildings as well as the Lindemann Performing Arts Center and Granoff Center for the Creative Arts
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The corridor is home to public art including sculptures by Maya Lin and Tom Friedman.
Pembroke campus.
The Women's College in Brown University, known as Pembroke College, was founded in October 1891. Upon its 1971 merger with the College of Brown University, Pembroke's campus was absorbed into the larger Brown campus. The Pembroke campus is bordered by Meeting, Brown, Bowen, and Thayer Streets and sits three blocks north of Brown's central campus. The campus is dominated by brick architecture, largely of the Georgian and Victorian styles. The west side of the quadrangle comprises Pembroke Hall (1897), Smith-Buonanno Hall (1907), and Metcalf Hall (1919), while the east side comprises Alumnae Hall (1927) and Miller Hall (1910). The quadrangle culminates on the north with Andrews Hall (1947).
East Campus, centered on Hope and Charlesfield streets, originally served as the campus of Bryant University. In 1969, as Bryant was preparing to relocate to Smithfield, Rhode Island, Brown purchased their Providence campus for $5 million. The transaction expanded the Brown campus by and 26 buildings. In 1971, Brown renamed the area East Campus. Today, the area is largely used for dormitories.
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Thayer Street runs through Brown's main campus. As a commercial corridor frequented by students, Thayer is comparable to Harvard Square or Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue. Wickenden Street, in the adjacent Fox Point neighborhood, is another commercial street similarly popular among students.
Built in 1925, Brown Stadium—the home of the school's football team—is located approximately a mile and a half northeast of the university's central campus. Marston Boathouse, the home of Brown's crew teams, lies on the Seekonk River, to the southeast of campus. Brown's sailing teams are based out of the Ted Turner Sailing Pavilion at the Edgewood Yacht Club in adjacent Cranston.
Since 2011, Brown's Warren Alpert Medical School has been located in Providence's historic Jewelry District, near the medical campus of Brown's teaching hospitals, Rhode Island Hospital and the Women and Infants Hospital of Rhode Island. Other university facilities, including molecular medicine labs and administrative offices, are likewise located in the area.
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Brown's School of Public Health occupies a landmark modernist building along the Providence River. Other Brown properties include the Mount Hope Grant in Bristol, Rhode Island, an important Native American site noted as a location of King Philip's War. Brown's Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology Collection Research Center, particularly strong in Native American items, is located in the Mount Hope Grant.
Sustainability.
Brown has committed to "minimize its energy use, reduce negative environmental impacts, and promote environmental stewardship." Since 2010, the university has required all new buildings meet LEED silver standards. Between 2007 and 2018, Brown reduced its greenhouse emissions by 27 percent; the majority of this reduction is attributable to the university's Thermal Efficiency Project which converted its central heating plant from a steam-powered system to a hot water-powered system.
In 2020, Brown announced it had sold 90 percent of its fossil fuel investments as part of a broader divestment from direct investments and managed funds that focus on fossil fuels. In 2021, the university adopted the goal of reducing quantifiable campus emissions by 75 percent by 2025 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2040. Brown is a member of the Ivy Plus Sustainability Consortium, through which it has committed to best-practice sharing and the ongoing exchange of campus sustainability solutions along with other member institutions.
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According to the A. W. Kuchler U.S. potential natural vegetation types, Brown would have a dominant vegetation type of Appalachian Oak ("104") with a dominant vegetation form of Eastern Hardwood Forest ("25").
Academics.
The College.
Founded in 1764, The College is Brown's oldest school. About 7,200 undergraduate students are enrolled in the college , and 81 concentrations are offered. For the graduating class of 2020, the most popular concentrations were Computer Science, Economics, Biology, History, Applied Mathematics, International Relations, and Political Science. A quarter of Brown undergraduates complete more than one concentration before graduating. If the existing programs do not align with their intended curricular interests, undergraduates may design and pursue independent concentrations.
Around 35 percent of undergraduates pursue graduate or professional study immediately, 60 percent within 5 years, and 80 percent within 10 years. For the Class of 2009, 56 percent of all undergraduate alumni have since earned graduate degrees. Among undergraduate alumni who go on to receive graduate degrees, the most common degrees earned are J.D. (16%), M.D. (14%), M.A. (14%), M.Sc. (14%), and Ph.D. (11%). The most common institutions from which undergraduate alumni earn graduate degrees are Brown University, Columbia University, and Harvard University.
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The highest fields of employment for undergraduate alumni ten years after graduation are education and higher education (15%), medicine (9%), business and finance (9%), law (8%), and computing and technology (7%).
Brown and RISD.
Since its 1893 relocation to College Hill, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) has bordered Brown to its west. Since 1900, Brown and RISD students have been able to cross-register at the two institutions, with Brown students permitted to take as many as four courses at RISD to count towards their Brown degree. The two institutions partner to provide various student-life services and the two student bodies compose a synergy in the College Hill cultural scene.
Dual Degree Program.
After several years of discussion between the two institutions and several students pursuing dual degrees unofficially, Brown and RISD formally established a five-year dual degree program in 2007, with the first class matriculating in the fall of 2008. The Brown|RISD Dual Degree Program, among the most selective in the country, offered admission to 20 of the 725 applicants for the class entering in autumn 2020, for an acceptance rate of 2.7%. The program combines the complementary strengths of the two institutions, integrating studio art and design at RISD with Brown's academic offerings. Students are admitted to the Dual Degree Program for a course lasting five years and culminating in both the Bachelor of Arts (A.B.) or Bachelor of Science (Sc.B.) degree from Brown and the Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.) degree from RISD. Prospective students must apply to the two schools separately and be accepted by separate admissions committees. Their application must then be approved by a third Brown|RISD joint committee.
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Admitted students spend the first year in residence at RISD completing its first-year Experimental and Foundation Studies curriculum while taking up to three Brown classes. Students spend their second year in residence at Brown, during which students take mainly Brown courses while starting on their RISD major requirements. In the third, fourth, and fifth years, students can elect to live at either school or off-campus, and course distribution is determined by the requirements of each student's unique combination of Brown concentration and RISD major. Program participants are noted for their creative and original approach to cross-disciplinary opportunities, combining, for example, industrial design with engineering, or anatomical illustration with human biology, or philosophy with sculpture, or architecture with urban studies. An annual "BRDD Exhibition" is a well-publicized and heavily attended event, drawing interest and attendees from the broader world of industry, design, the media, and the fine arts.
MADE Program.
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In 2020, the two schools announced the establishment of a new joint Master of Arts in Design Engineering program. Abbreviated as MADE, the program intends to combine RISD's programs in industrial design with Brown's programs in engineering. The program is administered through Brown's School of Engineering and RISD's Architecture and Design Division.
Theatre and playwriting.
Brown's theatre and playwriting programs are among the best-regarded in the country. Six Brown graduates have received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Alfred Uhry '58, Lynn Nottage '86, Ayad Akhtar '93, Nilo Cruz '94, Quiara Alegría Hudes '04, and Jackie Sibblies Drury MFA '04. In "American Theater" magazine's 2009 ranking of the most-produced American plays, Brown graduates occupied four of the top five places—Peter Nachtrieb '97, Rachel Sheinkin '89, Sarah Ruhl '97, and Stephen Karam '02.
The undergraduate concentration encompasses programs in theatre history, performance theory, playwriting, dramaturgy, acting, directing, dance, speech, and technical production. Applications for doctoral and master's degree programs are made through the University Graduate School. Master's degrees in acting and directing are pursued in conjunction with the Brown/Trinity Rep MFA program, which partners with the Trinity Repertory Company, a local regional theatre.
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Writing programs.
Writing at Brown—fiction, non-fiction, poetry, playwriting, screenwriting, electronic writing, mixed media, and the undergraduate writing proficiency requirement—is catered for by various centers and degree programs, and a faculty that has long included nationally and internationally known authors. The undergraduate concentration in literary arts offers courses in fiction, poetry, screenwriting, literary hypermedia, and translation. Graduate programs include the fiction and poetry MFA writing programs in the literary arts department and the MFA playwriting program in the theatre arts and performance studies department. The non-fiction writing program is offered in the English department. Screenwriting and cinema narrativity courses are offered in the departments of literary arts and modern culture and media. The undergraduate writing proficiency requirement is supported by the Writing Center.
Author prizewinners.
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Computer science.
Brown began offering computer science courses through the departments of Economics and Applied Mathematics in 1956 when it acquired an IBM machine. Brown added an IBM 650 in January 1958, the only one of its type between Hartford and Boston. In 1960, Brown opened its first dedicated computer building, the Brown University Computing Laboratory. The facility, designed by Philip Johnson, received an IBM 7070 computer the following year. The first undergraduate Computer Science degrees were awarded in 1974. Brown granted computer sciences full Departmental status in 1979. In 2009, IBM and Brown announced the installation of a supercomputer (by teraflops standards), the most powerful in the southeastern New England region.
In the 1960s, Andries van Dam, along with Ted Nelson and Bob Wallace invented The Hypertext Editing Systems, HES and FRESS while at Brown. Nelson coined the word "hypertext" while Van Dam's students helped originate XML, XSLT, and related Web standards. Among the school's computer science alumni are principal architect of the Classic Mac OS, Andy Hertzfeld; principal architect of the Intel 80386 and Intel 80486 microprocessors, John Crawford; former CEO of Apple, John Sculley; and digital effects programmer Masi Oka. Other alumni include former CS department head at MIT, John Guttag; software-defined networking pioneer Scott Shenker; Workday founder, Aneel Bhusri; MongoDB founder Eliot Horowitz; Figma founders Dylan Field and Evan Wallace (the latter of whom also created esbuild); OpenSea founder Devin Finzer; and Edward D. Lazowska, professor and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Chair emeritus at the University of Washington.
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Between 2012 and 2018, the number of concentrators in CS tripled. In 2017, computer science overtook economics as the school's most popular undergraduate concentration.
Applied mathematics.
Brown's program in applied mathematics was established in 1941 making it the oldest such program in the United States. The division is highly ranked and regarded nationally. Among the 67 recipients of the Timoshenko Medal, 22 have been affiliated with Brown's applied mathematics division as faculty, researchers, or students.
The Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World.
Established in 2004, the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World is Brown's interdisciplinary research center for archeology and ancient studies. The institute pursues fieldwork, excavations, regional surveys, and academic study of the archaeology and art of the ancient Mediterranean, Egypt, and Western Asia from the Levant to the Caucasus. The institute has a very active fieldwork profile, with faculty-led excavations and regional surveys presently in Petra (Jordan), Abydos (Egypt), Turkey, Sudan, Italy, Mexico, Guatemala, Montserrat, and Providence.
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The Joukowsky Institute's faculty includes cross-appointments from the departments of Egyptology, Assyriology, Classics, Anthropology, and History of Art and Architecture. Faculty research and publication areas include Greek and Roman art and architecture, landscape archaeology, urban and religious architecture of the Levant, Roman provincial studies, the Aegean Bronze Age, and the archaeology of the Caucasus. The institute offers visiting teaching appointments and postdoctoral fellowships which have, in recent years, included Near Eastern Archaeology and Art, Classical Archaeology and Art, Islamic Archaeology and Art, and Archaeology and Media Studies.
Egyptology and Assyriology
Facing the Joukowsky Institute, across the Front Green, is the Department of Egyptology and Assyriology, formed in 2006 by the merger of Brown's departments of Egyptology and History of Mathematics. It is one of only a handful of such departments in the United States. The curricular focus is on three principal areas: Egyptology, Assyriology, and the history of the ancient exact sciences (astronomy, astrology, and mathematics). Many courses in the department are open to all Brown undergraduates without prerequisites and include archaeology, languages, history, and Egyptian and Mesopotamian religions, literature, and science. Students concentrating in the department choose a track of either Egyptology or Assyriology. Graduate-level study comprises three tracks to the doctoral degree: Egyptology, Assyriology, or the History of the Exact Sciences in Antiquity.
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The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown's center for the study of global Issues and public affairs, is one of the leading institutes of its type in the country. The institute occupies facilities designed by Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly and Japanese architect Toshiko Mori. The institute was initially endowed by Thomas Watson Jr. (Class of 1937), former Ambassador to the Soviet Union and longtime president of IBM.
Institute faculty and faculty emeritus include Italian prime minister and European Commission president Romano Prodi, Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Chilean president Ricardo Lagos Escobar, Mexican novelist and statesman Carlos Fuentes, Brazilian statesman and United Nations commission head Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, Indian foreign minister and ambassador to the United States Nirupama Rao, American diplomat and Dayton Peace Accords author Richard Holbrooke (Class of 1962), and Sergei Khrushchev, editor of the papers of his father Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union.
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The institute's curricular interest is organized into the principal themes of development, security, and governance—with further focuses on globalization, economic uncertainty, security threats, environmental degradation, and poverty. Six Brown undergraduate concentrations are hosted by the Watson Institute: Development Studies, International and Public Affairs, International Relations, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Middle East Studies, Public Policy, and South Asian Studies. Graduate programs offered at the Watson Institute include the Graduate Program in Development (Ph.D.) and the Master of Public Affairs (M.P.A) Program. The institute also offers postdoctoral, professional development, and global outreach programming. In support of these programs, the institute houses various centers, including the Brazil Initiative, Brown-India Initiative, China Initiative, Middle East Studies Center, The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), and the Taubman Center for Public Policy. In recent years, the most internationally cited product of the Watson Institute has been its Costs of War Project, first released in 2011 and continuously updated since. The project comprises a team of economists, anthropologists, political scientists, legal experts, and physicians, and seeks to calculate the economic costs, human casualties, and impact on civil liberties of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since 2001.
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The School of Engineering.
Established in 1847, Brown's engineering program is the oldest in the Ivy League and the third oldest civilian engineering program in the country. In 1916, Brown's departments of electrical, mechanical, and civil engineering were merged into a single Division of Engineering. In 2010 the division was elevated to a School of Engineering.
Engineering at Brown is especially interdisciplinary. The school is organized without the traditional departments or boundaries found at most schools and follows a model of connectivity between disciplines—including biology, medicine, physics, chemistry, computer science, the humanities, and the social sciences. The school practices an innovative clustering of faculties in which engineers team with non-engineers to bring a convergence of ideas.
Student teams have launched two CubeSats with the support of the School of Engineering. Brown Space Engineering developed EQUiSat a 1U satellite, and another interdisciplinary team developed SBUDNIC a 3U satellite.
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IE Brown Executive MBA Dual Degree Program.
Since 2009, Brown has developed an Executive MBA program in conjunction with one of the leading Business Schools in Europe, IE Business School in Madrid. This relationship has since strengthened resulting in both institutions offering a dual degree program. In this partnership, Brown provides its traditional coursework while IE provides most of the business-related subjects making a differentiated alternative program to other Ivy League's EMBAs. The cohort typically consists of 25–30 EMBA candidates from some 20 countries. Classes are held in Providence, Madrid, Cape Town and Online.
The Pembroke Center.
The Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women was established at Brown in 1981 by Joan Wallach Scott as an interdisciplinary research center on gender. The center is named for Pembroke College, Brown's former women's college, and is affiliated with Brown's Sarah Doyle Women's Center. The Pembroke Center supports Brown's undergraduate concentration in Gender and Sexuality Studies, post-doctoral research fellowships, the annual Pembroke Seminar, and other academic programs. It also manages various collections, archives, and resources, including the Elizabeth Weed Feminist Theory Papers and the Christine Dunlap Farnham Archive.
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The Graduate School.
Brown introduced graduate courses in the 1870s and granted its first advanced degrees in 1888. The university established a Graduate Department in 1903 and a full Graduate School in 1927.
With an enrollment of approximately 2,600 students, the school currently offers 33 and 51 master's and doctoral programs, respectively. The school additionally offers a number of fifth-year master's programs. Overall, admission to the Graduate School is most competitive with an acceptance rate averaging at approximately 9 percent in recent years.
Carney Institute for Brain Science.
The Robert J. & Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science is Brown's cross-departmental neuroscience research institute. The institute's core focus areas include brain-computer interfaces and computational neuroscience; additional areas of focus include research into mechanisms of cell death with the interest of developing therapies for neurodegenerative diseases.
The Carney Institute was founded by John Donoghue in 2009 as the Brown Institute for Brain Science and renamed in 2018 in recognition of a $100 million gift. The donation, one of the largest in the university's history, established the institute as one of the best-endowed university neuroscience programs in the country.
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Alpert Medical School.
Established in 1811, Brown's Alpert Medical School is the fourth oldest medical school in the Ivy League.
In 1827, medical instruction was suspended by President Francis Wayland after the program's faculty declined to follow a new policy requiring students to live on campus. The program was reorganized in 1972; the first M.D. degrees from the new Program in Medicine were awarded to a graduating class of 58 students in 1975. In 1991, the school was officially renamed the Brown University School of Medicine, then renamed once more to Brown Medical School in October 2000. In January 2007, entrepreneur and philanthropist Warren Alpert donated $100 million to the school. In recognition of the gift, the school's name was changed to the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.
In 2020, "U.S. News & World Report" ranked Brown's medical school the 9th most selective in the country, with an acceptance rate of 2.8%. "U.S. News" ranks the school 38th for research and 35th for primary care.
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Brown's medical school is known especially for its eight-year Program in Liberal Medical Education (PLME), an eight-year combined baccalaureate-M.D. medical program. Inaugurated in 1984, the program is one of the most selective and renowned programs of its type in the country, offering admission to only 2% of applicants in 2021.
Since 1976, the Early Identification Program (EIP) has encouraged Rhode Island residents to pursue careers in medicine by recruiting sophomores from Providence College, Rhode Island College, the University of Rhode Island, and Tougaloo College. In 2004, the school once again began to accept applications from premedical students at other colleges and universities via AMCAS like most other medical schools. The medical school also offers M.D./PhD, M.D./M.P.H. and M.D./M.P.P. dual degree programs.
School of Public Health.
Brown's School of Public Health grew out of the Alpert Medical School's Department of Community Health and was officially founded in 2013 as an independent school. The school issues undergraduate (A.B., Sc.B.), graduate (M.P.H., Sc.M., A.M.), doctoral (Ph.D.), and dual-degrees (M.P.H./M.P.A., M.D./M.P.H.).
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Online programs.
The Brown University School of Professional Studies currently offers blended learning Executive master's degrees in Healthcare Leadership, Cyber Security, and Science and Technology Leadership. The master's degrees are designed to help students who have a job and life outside of academia to progress in their respective fields. The students meet in Providence every 6–7 weeks for a weekly seminar each trimester.
The university has also invested in MOOC development starting in 2013, when two courses, "Archeology's Dirty Little Secrets" and "The Fiction of Relationship", both of which received thousands of students. However, after a year of courses, the university broke its contract with Coursera and revamped its online persona and MOOC development department. By 2017, the university released new courses on edx, two of which were "The Ethics of Memory" and "Artful Medicine: Art's Power to Enrich Patient Care". In January 2018, Brown published its first "game-ified" course called "Fantastic Places, Unhuman Humans: Exploring Humanity Through Literature", which featured out-of-platform games to help learners understand materials, as well as a story-line that immerses users into a fictional world to help characters along their journey.
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Admissions and financial aid.
Undergraduate.
Undergraduate admission to Brown University is considered "most selective" by "U.S. News & World Report." For the undergraduate class of 2026, Brown received 50,649 applications—the largest applicant pool in the university's history and a 9% increase from the prior year. Of these applicants, 2,560 were admitted for an acceptance rate of 5.0%, the lowest in the university's history.
In 2021, the university reported a yield rate of 69%. For the academic year 2019–20 the university received 2,030 transfer applications, of which 5.8% were accepted.
Brown's admissions policy is currently stipulated need-blind for all domestic first-year applicants, but will be extended to international first-year applicants starting with the Class of 2029. In 2017, Brown announced that loans would be eliminated from all undergraduate financial aid awards starting in 2018–2019, as part of a new $30 million campaign called the "Brown Promise". In 2016–17, the university awarded need-based scholarships worth $120.5 million. The average need-based award for the class of 2020 was $47,940.
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Graduate.
In 2017, the Graduate School accepted 11% of 9,215 applicants. In 2021, Brown received a record 948 applications for roughly 90 spots in its Master of Public Health Degree.
In 2020, "U.S. News" ranked Brown's Warren Alpert Medical School the 9th most selective in the country, with an acceptance rate of 2.8 percent.
Rankings.
Brown University is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education. For their 2021 rankings, The Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education ranked Brown 5th in the "Best Colleges 2021" edition.
The "Forbes" magazine annual ranking of "America's Top Colleges 2022"—which ranked 600 research universities, liberal arts colleges and service academies—ranked Brown 19th overall and 18th among universities.
"U.S. News & World Report" ranked Brown 9th among national universities in its 2023 edition. The 2022 edition also ranked Brown 2nd for undergraduate teaching, 25th in Most Innovative Schools, and 14th in Best Value Schools.
"Washington Monthly" ranked Brown 30th in 2024 among 438 national universities in the U.S. based on its contribution to the public good, as measured by social mobility, research, and promoting public service.
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In 2022, "U.S. News & World Report" ranks Brown 129th globally.
In 2014, "Forbes" magazine ranked Brown 7th on its list of "America's Most Entrepreneurial Universities." The "Forbes" analysis looked at the ratio of "alumni and students who have identified themselves as founders and business owners on LinkedIn" and the total number of alumni and students. LinkedIn particularized the "Forbes" rankings, placing Brown third (between MIT and Princeton) among "Best Undergraduate Universities for Software Developers at Startups." LinkedIn's methodology involved a career-path examination of "millions of alumni profiles" in its membership database.
In 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2021 the university produced the most Fulbright recipients of any university in the nation. Brown has also produced the 7th most Rhodes Scholars of all colleges and universities in the United States.
In 2025 the university ranked 229 of 257 top colleges in free speech rankings by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and "College Pulse," after ranking at 69 in 2024 and at 114 in 2022/2023.
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Research.
Brown is a member of the Association of American Universities since 1933 and is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity". In FY 2017, Brown spent $212.3 million on research and was ranked 103rd in the United States by total R&D expenditure by National Science Foundation. In 2021 Brown's School of Public Health received the 4th most funding in NIH awards among schools of public health in the U.S.
Student life.
Campus safety.
In 2014, Brown tied with the University of Connecticut for the highest number of reported rapes in the nation, with its "total of reports of rape" on their main campus standing at 43. However, such rankings have been criticized for failing to account for how different campus environments can encourage or discourage individuals from reporting sexual assault cases, thereby affecting the number of reported rapes.
Spring weekend.
Established in 1950, Spring Weekend is an annual spring music festival for students. Historical performers at the festival have included Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen, and U2. More recent headliners include Kendrick Lamar, Young Thug, Daniel Caesar, Anderson .Paak, Mitski, Aminé, and Mac DeMarco. Since 1960, Spring Weekend has been organized by the student-run Brown Concert Agency.
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Residential and Greek societies.
Approximately 12 percent of Brown students participate in Greek Life. The university recognizes thirteen active Greek organizations. Since the early 1950s, all Greek organizations on campus have been located in Wriston Quadrangle.
Societies and clubs.
The earliest societies at Brown were devoted to oration and debate. The Pronouncing Society is mentioned in the diary of Solomon Drowne, class of 1773, who was voted its president in 1771. The organization seems to have disappeared during the American Revolutionary War. Subsequent societies include the Misokosmian Society (est. 1798 and renamed the Philermenian Society), the Philandrian Society (est. 1799), the United Brothers (1806), the Philophysian Society (1818), and the Franklin Society (1824). Societies served social as well as academic purposes, with many supporting literary debate and amassing large libraries. Older societies generally aligned with Federalists while younger societies generally leaned Republican.
Societies remained popular into the 1860s, after which they were largely replaced by fraternities.
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The Cammarian Club was at first a semi-secret society that "tapped" 15 seniors each year. In 1915, self-perpetuating membership gave way to popular election by the student body, and thenceforward the club served as the "de facto" undergraduate student government. The organization was dissolved in 1971 and ultimately succeeded by a formal student government.
Societas Domi Pacificae, known colloquially as "Pacifica House", is a present-day, self-described secret society. It purports a continuous line of descent from the Franklin Society of 1824, citing a supposed intermediary "Franklin Society" traceable in the nineteenth century.
Student organizations.
There are over 300 registered student organizations on campus with diverse interests. The Student Activities Fair, during the orientation program, provides first-year students the opportunity to become acquainted with a wide range of organizations. A sample of organizations includes:
LGBTQ+.
In 2023, 38% of Brown's students identified as being LGBTQ+, in a poll by "The Brown Daily Herald". The 2023 LGBTQ+ self-identification level was an increase, up from 14% LGBT identification in 2010. "Bisexual" was the most common answer amongst LGBTQ+ respondents to the poll.
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Resource centers.
Brown has several resource centers on campus. The centers often act as sources of support as well as safe spaces for students to explore certain aspects of their identity. Additionally, the centers often provide physical spaces for students to study and have meetings. Although most centers are identity-focused, some provide academic support as well.
The Brown Center for Students of Color (BCSC) is a space that provides support for students of color. Established in 1972 at the demand of student protests, the BCSC encourages students to engage in critical dialogue, develop leadership skills, and promote social justice. The center houses various programs for students to share their knowledge and engage in discussion. Programs include the Third World Transition Program, the Minority Peer Counselor Program, the Heritage Series, and other student-led initiatives. Additionally, the BCSC hopes to foster community among the students it serves by providing spaces for students to meet and study.
The Sarah Doyle Women's Center aims to provide a space for members of the Brown community to examine and explore issues surrounding gender. The center was named after one of the first women to attend Brown, Sarah Doyle. The center emphasizes intersectionality in its conversations on gender, encouraging people to see gender as present and relevant in various aspects of life. The center hosts programs and workshops in order to facilitate dialogue and provide resources for students, faculty, and staff.
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Other centers include the LGBTQ Center, the Undocumented, First-Generation College and Low-Income Student (U-FLi) Center, and the Curricular Resource Center.
Activism.
1968 Black Student Walkout.
On December 5, 1968, several Black women from Pembroke College initiated a walkout in protest of an atmosphere at the colleges described by Black students as a "stifling, frustrating, [and] degrading place for Black students" after feeling the colleges were non-responsive to their concerns. In total, 65 Black students participated in the walkout. Their principal demand was to increase Black student enrollment to 11% of the student populace, in an attempt to match that of the proportion in the US. This ultimately resulted in a 300% increase in Black enrollment the following year, but some demands have yet to be met.
Divestment from South Africa.
In the mid-1980s, under student pressure, the university divested from certain companies involved in South Africa. Some students were still unsatisfied with partial divestment and began a fast in Manning Chapel and the university disenrolled them. In April 1987, "dozens" of students interrupted a university corporation meeting, leading to 20 being put on probation.
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Protest of speech by NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly.
In 2013, students and Providence community members protested and disrupted a speech by then-NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly. The incident was cited by Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, as a high-profile example of a form of student protest questioning conceptions of free speech. The incident was also the subject of a short critical documentary in 2016 by Brown alumnus Rob Montz.
Israel-Gaza protests.
In early November 2023, twenty students of Jewish background staged a sit in at University hall, resulting in their arrests. The students were protesting the Gaza war and calling for a ceasefire, as well as for the university to divest from companies that "facilitate the 'Israeli military occupation' in Gaza." In early December 2023, forty-one more students held a sit-in with similar demands, resulting in more arrests by the university. Nineteen students participated in an eight-day hunger strike preceding a corporation meeting in early February 2024 with the demand to present their case to corporation members.
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Athletics.
Brown is a member of the Ivy League athletic conference, which is categorized as a Division I (top-level) conference of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).
The Brown Bears has one of the largest university sports programs in the United States, sponsoring 32 varsity intercollegiate teams. Brown's athletic program is one of the "U.S. News & World Report" top 20—the "College Sports Honor Roll"—based on breadth of the program and athletes' graduation rates.
Brown's newest varsity team is women's rugby, promoted from club-sport status in 2014. Brown women's rowing has won 7 national titles between 1999 and 2011. Brown men's rowing perennially finishes in the top 5 in the nation, most recently winning silver, bronze, and silver in the national championship races of 2012, 2013, and 2014. The men's and women's crews have also won championship trophies at the Henley Royal Regatta and the Henley Women's Regatta. Brown's men's soccer is consistently ranked in the top 20 and has won 18 Ivy League titles overall; recent soccer graduates play professionally in Major League Soccer and overseas.
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Brown football, under its most successful coach historically, Phil Estes, won Ivy League championships in 1999, 2005, and 2008. high-profile alumni of the football program include former Houston Texans head coach Bill O'Brien; former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, Heisman Trophy namesake John W. Heisman, and Pollard Award namesake Fritz Pollard.
Brown women's gymnastics won the Ivy League tournament in 2013 and 2014. The Brown women's sailing team has won 5 national championships, most recently in 2019 while the coed sailing team won 2 national championships in 1942 and 1948. Both teams are consistency ranked in the top 10 in the nation.
The first intercollegiate ice hockey game in America was played between Brown and Harvard on January 19, 1898. The first university rowing regatta larger than a dual-meet was held between Brown, Harvard, and Yale at Lake Quinsigamond in Massachusetts on July 26, 1859.
Brown also supports competitive intercollegiate club sports, including ultimate frisbee. The men's ultimate team, Brownian Motion, has won four national championships, in 2000, 2005, 2019 and 2024.
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Notable people.
Alumni.
Alumni in politics and government include U.S. Secretary of State John Hay (1852), U.S. Secretary of State and U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney (1856), Chief Justice of the United States and U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes (1881), Governor of Wyoming Territory and Nebraska Governor John Milton Thayer (1841), Rhode Island Governor Augustus Bourn (1855), Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal '92, U.S. Senator Maggie Hassan '80 of New Hampshire, Delaware Governor Jack Markell '82, Rhode Island Representative David Cicilline '83, Minnesota Representative Dean Phillips '91, 2020 Presidential candidate and entrepreneur Andrew Yang '96, DNC Chair Tom Perez '83, diplomat Richard Holbrooke '62, and career United States diplomat W. Stuart Symington '74.
Prominent alumni in business and finance include philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1897), managing director of McKinsey & Company and "father of modern management consulting" Marvin Bower '25, former Chair of the Federal Reserve and current U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen '67, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim '82, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan '81, CNN founder Ted Turner '60, IBM chairman and CEO Thomas Watson Jr. '37, co-founder of Starwood Capital Group Barry Sternlicht '82, Apple Inc. CEO John Sculley '61, Blackberry Ltd. CEO John S. Chen '78, Facebook CFO David Ebersman '91, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi '91. Companies founded by Brown alumni include CNN,"The Wall Street Journal," Searchlight Pictures, Netgear, W Hotels, Workday, Warby Parker, Casper, Figma, ZipRecruiter, and Cards Against Humanity.""
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Alumni in the arts and media include actors Emma Watson '14, John Krasinski '01, Daveed Diggs '04, Julie Bowen '91, Tracee Ellis Ross '94, and Jessica Capshaw '98; NPR program host Ira Glass '82; singer-composer Mary Chapin Carpenter '81; humorist and Marx Brothers screenwriter S. J. Perelman '25; novelists Nathanael West '24, Jeffrey Eugenides '83, Edwidge Danticat (MFA '93), and Marilynne Robinson '66; and composer and synthesizer pioneer Wendy Carlos '62, journalist James Risen '77; political pundit Mara Liasson; MSNBC hosts Alex Wagner '99 and Chris Hayes '01; "New York Times "publisher A. G. Sulzberger '03, and magazine editor John F. Kennedy Jr. '83.
Important figures in the history of education include the father of American public school education Horace Mann (1819), civil libertarian and Amherst College president Alexander Meiklejohn, first president of the University of South Carolina Jonathan Maxcy (1787), Bates College founder Oren B. Cheney (1836), University of Michigan president (1871–1909) James Burrill Angell (1849), University of California president (1899–1919) Benjamin Ide Wheeler (1875), and Morehouse College's first African-American president John Hope (1894).
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Alumni in the computer sciences and industry include architect of Intel 386, 486, and Pentium microprocessors John H. Crawford '75, inventor of the first silicon transistor Gordon Kidd Teal '31, MongoDB founder Eliot Horowitz '03, Figma founder Dylan Field, and Macintosh developer Andy Hertzfeld '75.
Other notable alumni include "Lafayette of the Greek Revolution" and its historian Samuel Gridley Howe (1821), NASA head during first seven Apollo missions Thomas O. Paine '42, sportscaster Chris Berman '77, Houston Texans head coach Bill O'Brien '92, 2018 Miss America Cara Mund '16, Penn State football coach Joe Paterno '50, Heisman Trophy namesake John W. Heisman '91, distinguished professor of law Cortney Lollar '97, Former SEC Commissioner Annette Nazareth ‘78, Olympic and world champion triathlete Joanna Zeiger, royals and nobles such as Prince Rahim Aga Khan, Prince Faisal bin Al Hussein of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Princess Leila Pahlavi of Iran '92, Prince Nikolaos of Greece and Denmark, Prince Nikita Romanov, Princess Theodora of Greece and Denmark, Prince Jaime of Bourbon-Parma, Duke of San Jaime and Count of Bardi, Prince Ra'ad bin Zeid, Lady Gabriella Windsor, Prince Alexander von Fürstenberg, Countess Cosima von Bülow Pavoncelli, and her half-brother Prince Alexander-Georg von Auersperg.
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Nobel Laureate alumni include humanitarian Jerry White '87 (Peace, 1997), biologist Craig Mello '82 (Physiology or Medicine, 2006), economist Guido Imbens (AM '89, PhD '91; Economic Sciences, 2021), and economist Douglas Diamond '75 (Economic Sciences, 2022).
Faculty.
Among Brown's past and present faculty are seven Nobel Laureates: Lars Onsager (Chemistry, 1968), Leon Cooper (Physics, 1972), George Snell (Physiology or Medicine, 1980), George Stigler (Economic Sciences, 1982), Henry David Abraham (Peace, 1985), Vernon L. Smith (Economic Sciences, 2002), and J. Michael Kosterlitz (Physics, 2016).
Notable past and present faculty include biologists Anne Fausto-Sterling (Ph.D. 1970) and Kenneth R. Miller (Sc.B. 1970); computer scientists Robert Sedgewick and Andries van Dam; economists Hyman Minsky, Glenn Loury, George Stigler, Mark Blyth, and Emily Oster; historians Gordon S. Wood and Joan Wallach Scott; mathematicians David Gale, David Mumford, Mary Cartwright, and Solomon Lefschetz; physicists Sylvester James Gates and Gerald Guralnik. Faculty in literature include Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Julio Ortega, and Carlos Fuentes. Among Brown's faculty and fellows in political science, and public affairs are the former prime minister of Italy and former EU chief, Romano Prodi; former president of Brazil, Fernando Cardoso; former president of Chile, Ricardo Lagos; and son of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Sergei Khrushchev. Other faculty include philosopher Martha Nussbaum, author Ibram X. Kendi, and public health doctor Ashish Jha.
In popular culture.
Mentions of Brown in fiction and popular culture include the following. "Family Guy" character Brian Griffin is a Brown alumnus. "The O.C."s main character Seth Cohen is denied acceptance to Brown while his girlfriend Summer Roberts is accepted. |
Bill Atkinson
William D. Atkinson (born March 17, 1951) is an American computer engineer, computer programmer and photographer. Atkinson worked at Apple Computer from 1978 to 1990.
Some of Atkinson's noteworthy contributions to the field of computing include Macintosh QuickDraw and Lisa LisaGraf
(Atkinson independently discovered the midpoint circle algorithm for fast drawing of circles by using the sum of consecutive odd numbers), Marching ants, the double-click, Menu bar, the selection lasso, MacPaint (FatBits), HyperCard, Atkinson dithering, and the app PhotoCard.
Education.
He received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, San Diego, where Apple Macintosh developer Jef Raskin was one of his professors. Atkinson continued his studies as a graduate student in neurochemistry at the University of Washington.
Apple.
Raskin invited Atkinson to visit him at Apple Computer; Steve Jobs persuaded him to join the company immediately as employee No. 51, and Atkinson never finished his PhD. Atkinson was the principal designer and developer of the graphical user interface (GUI) of the Apple Lisa and, later, one of the first thirty members of the original Apple Macintosh development team, and was the creator of the MacPaint application. He also designed and implemented QuickDraw, the fundamental toolbox that the Lisa and Macintosh used for graphics. QuickDraw's performance was essential for the success of the Macintosh GUI. He also was one of the main designers of the Lisa and Macintosh user interfaces. Atkinson also conceived, designed and implemented HyperCard, an early and influential hypermedia system. HyperCard put the power of computer programming and database design into the hands of nonprogrammers. In 1994, Atkinson received the EFF Pioneer Award for his contributions.
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Career after Apple.
Around 1990, General Magic's founding, with Bill Atkinson as one of the three cofounders, met the following press in "Byte" magazine:
The obstacles to General Magic's success may appear daunting, but General Magic is not your typical start-up company. Its partners include some of the biggest players in the worlds of computing, communications, and consumer electronics, and it's loaded with top-notch engineers who have been given a clean slate to reinvent traditional approaches to ubiquitous worldwide communications.
In 2007, Atkinson began working as an outside developer with Numenta, a startup working on computer intelligence. On his work there Atkinson said, "what Numenta is doing is more fundamentally important to society than the personal computer and the rise of the Internet."
Photography.
Currently, Atkinson works as a nature photographer, focusing on close-up photographs of stones that have been cut and polished. His 2004 book "Within the Stone" features a collection of his close-up photographs. The detailed images he creates are made possible by the accuracy and creative control of the digital printing process that he helped create.
In popular culture.
Actor Nelson Franklin portrayed him in the 2013 film "Jobs". |
Battle of Lostwithiel
The Battle of Lostwithiel took place over a 13-day period from 21 August to 2 September 1644, around the town of Lostwithiel and along the River Fowey valley in Cornwall during the First English Civil War. A Royalist army led by Charles I of England defeated a Parliamentarian force commanded by the Earl of Essex.
Although Essex and most of the cavalry escaped, between 5,000 and 6,000 Parliamentarian infantry were forced to surrender. Since the Royalists were unable to feed so many, they were given a pass back to their own territory, arriving in Southampton a month later having lost nearly half their number to disease and desertion.
Considered one of the worst defeats suffered by Parliament over the course of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, it secured South West England for the Royalists until early 1646.
Background.
During April and May 1644, Parliamentarian commanders Sir William Waller and the Earl of Essex combined their armies and carried out a campaign against King Charles and the Royalist garrisons surrounding Oxford. Trusting Waller to deal with the King in Oxfordshire, Essex divided the Parliamentarian army on 6 June and headed southwest to relieve the Royalist siege of Lyme in Dorset. Lyme had been under siege by King Charles' nephew, Prince Maurice, and the Royalists for nearly two months.
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South-West England at that time was largely under the control of the Royalists. The town of Lyme, however, was a Parliamentarian stronghold and served as an important seaport for the Parliamentarian fleet of the Earl of Warwick. As Essex approached Lyme in mid-June Prince Maurice ended the siege and took his troops west to Exeter.
Essex then proceeded further southwest toward Cornwall with the intent to relieve the siege of Plymouth. Plymouth was the only other significant Parliamentarian stronghold in the South-West and it was under siege by Richard Grenville and Cornish Royalists. Essex had been told by Lord Robartes, a wealthy politician and merchant from Cornwall, that the Parliamentarians would gain considerable military support if he moved against Grenville and freed Plymouth. Given Lord Robartes' advice, Essex advanced toward Plymouth. His action caused Grenville to end the siege. Essex then advanced further west, believing that he could take full control of the South-West from the Royalists.
Meanwhile, in Oxfordshire, King Charles battled with the Parliamentarians and defeated Sir William Waller at the Battle of Cropredy Bridge on 29 June. On 12 July after a Royalist council of war recommended that Essex be dealt with before he could be reinforced, King Charles and his Oxford army departed Evesham. King Charles accepted the council's advice, not solely because it was good strategy, but more so because his Queen was in Exeter, where she had recently given birth to the Princess Henrietta and had been denied safe conduct to Bath by Essex.
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Trapped in Cornwall.
On 26 July, King Charles arrived in Exeter and joined his Oxford army with the Royalist forces commanded by Prince Maurice. On that same day, Essex and his Parliamentary force entered Cornwall. One week later, as Essex bivouacked with his army at Bodmin, he learned that King Charles had defeated Waller; brought his Oxford army to the South-West; and joined forces with Prince Maurice. Essex had also seen that he was not getting the military support from the people of Cornwall as Lord Robartes asserted. At that time, Essex understood that he and his army were trapped in Cornwall and his only salvation would be reinforcements or an escape through the port of Fowey by means of the Parliamentarian fleet.
Essex immediately marched his troops five miles south to the small town of Lostwithiel arriving on 2 August. He immediately deployed his men in a defensive arc with detachments on the high ground to the north at Restormel Castle and the high ground to the east at Beacon Hill. Essex also sent a small contingent of foot south to secure the port of Fowey aiming to eventually evacuate his infantry by sea. At Essex's disposal was a force of 6,500 foot and 3,000 horse.
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Aided through intelligence provided by the people of Cornwall , King Charles followed westward, slowly and deliberately cutting off the potential escape routes that Essex might attempt to utilize. On 6 August King Charles communicated with Essex, calling for him to surrender. Stalling for several days, Essex considered the offer but ultimately refused.
On 11 August, Grenville and the Cornish Royalists entered Bodmin forcing out Essex's rear-guard cavalry. Grenville then proceeded south across Respryn Bridge to meet and join forces with King Charles and Prince Maurice. It is estimated that the Royalist forces at that time were composed of 12,000 foot and 7,000 horse. Over the next two days the Royalists deployed detachments along the east side of the River Fowey to prevent a Parliamentarian escape across country. Finally the Royalists sent 200 foot with artillery south to garrison the fort at Polruan, effectively blocking the entrance to the harbour of Fowey. At about that time, Essex learned that reinforcements under the command of Sir John Middleton were turned back by the Royalists at Bridgwater in Somerset.
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First battle - 21–30 August 1644.
At 07:00 hours on 21 August, King Charles launched his first attack on Essex and the Parliamentarians at Lostwithiel. From the north, Grenville and the Cornish Royalists attacked Restormel Castle and easily dislodged the Parliamentarians who fell back quickly. From the east, King Charles and the Oxford army captured Beacon Hill with little resistance from the Parliamentarians. Prince Maurice and his force occupied Druid Hill. Casualties were fairly low and by nightfall the fighting ended and the Royalists held the high ground on the north and east sides of Lostwithiel.
For the next couple of days the two opposing forces exchanged fire only in a number of small skirmishes. On 24 August, King Charles further tightened the noose encircling the Parliamentarians when he sent Lord Goring and Sir Thomas Bassett to secure the town of St Blazey and the area to the southwest of Lostwithiel. This reduced the foraging area for the Parliamentarians and access to the coves and inlets in the vicinity of the port of Par.
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Essex and the Parliamentarians were now totally surrounded and boxed into a two-mile by five-mile area spanning from Lostwithiel in the north to the port of Fowey in the south. Knowing that he would not be able to fight his way out, Essex made his final plans for an escape. Since a sea evacuation of his cavalry would not be possible, Essex ordered his cavalry commander William Balfour to attempt a breakout to Plymouth. For the infantry, Essex planned to retreat south and meet Lord Warwick and the Parliamentarian fleet at Fowey. At 03:00 hours on 31 August, Balfour and 2,000 members of his cavalry executed the first step of Essex's plan when they successfully crossed the River Fowey and escaped intact without engaging the Royalist defenders.
Second battle - 31 August - 2 September 1644.
Early on the morning on 31 August, the Parliamentarians ransacked and looted Lostwithiel and began their withdrawal south. At 07:00 hours, the Royalists observed the actions of the Parliamentarians and immediately proceeded to attack. Grenville attacked from the north. King Charles and Prince Maurice crossed the River Fowey, joined up with Grenville, and entered Lostwithiel. Together the Royalists engaged the Parliamentarian rear-guards and quickly took possession of the town. The Royalist also sent detachments down along the east side of the River Fowey to protect against any further breakouts and to capture the town of Polruan.
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The Royalists then began to pursue Essex and the Parliamentarian infantry down the river valley. At the outset the Royalist pushed the Parliamentarians nearly three miles south through the hedged fields, hills and valleys. At the narrow pass near St. Veep, Philip Skippon, Essex's commander of the infantry, counter-attacked the Royalists and pushed them back several fields attempting to give Essex time to set up a line of defense further south. At 11:00 hours, the Royalist cavalry mounted a charge and won back the territory lost. There was a lull in the battle at 12:00 hours as King Charles waited for his full army to come up and reform.
The fighting resumed and continued through the afternoon as the Parliamentarians tried to disengage and continue south. At 16:00 hours, the Parliamentarians tried again to counter-attack with their remaining cavalry only to be driven back by King Charles' Life Guard. About a mile north of Castle Dore, the Parliamentarians right flank began to give way. At 18:00 hours when the Parliamentarians were pushed back to Castle Dore they made their last attempt to rally only to be pushed back and surrounded.
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About that time the fighting ended with the Royalists satisfied in their accomplishments of the day. Exhausted and discouraged, the Parliamentarians hunkered down for the night. Later that evening under the darkness of night, Essex and his command staff stole away to the seashore where they used a fishing boat to flee to Plymouth, leaving Skippon in command.
Early on 1 September, Skippon met with his officers to inform them about Essex's escape and to discuss alternatives. It was decided that they would approach King Charles and seek terms. Concerned that Parliamentarian reinforcements might be on their way, the King quickly agreed on 2 September to generous terms. The battle was over. Six thousand Parliamentarians were taken as prisoners. Their weapons were taken away and they were marched to Southampton. They suffered the wrath of the Cornish people in route and as many as 3,000 died of exposure and disease along the way. Those that survived the journey were, however, eventually set free. Total casualties associated with the battle were extremely high especially when considering those who died on the march back to Southampton. To those numbers as many as 700 Parliamentarians are estimated to have been killed or wounded during the fighting in Cornwall along with an estimated 500 Royalists.
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Aftermath.
The Battle of Lostwithiel was a great victory for King Charles and the greatest loss that the Parliamentarians would suffer in the First English Civil War. For King Charles the victory secured the South-West for the remainder of the war and mitigated criticism for a while against the Royalist war effort.
For the Parliamentarians, the defeat resulted in recriminations with Middleton ultimately being blamed for his failure to break through with reinforcements. The Parliamentarian failure at Lostwithiel along with the failure to defeat King Charles at the Second Battle of Newbury ultimately led Parliament to adopt the Self-denying Ordinance and led to the implementation of the New Model Army. |
Beeb
Beeb or BEEB may refer to: |
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and public intellectual. He had influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, and various areas of analytic philosophy.
He was one of the early 20th century's prominent logicians and a founder of analytic philosophy, along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, his friend and colleague G. E. Moore, and his student and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. Russell with Moore led the British "revolt against idealism". Together with his former teacher A. N. Whitehead, Russell wrote "Principia Mathematica", a milestone in the development of classical logic and a major attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic (see logicism). Russell's article "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy".
Russell was a pacifist who championed anti-imperialism and chaired the India League. He went to prison for his pacifism during World War I, and initially supported appeasement against Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, before changing his view in 1943, describing war as a necessary "lesser of two evils". In the wake of World War II, he welcomed American global hegemony in preference to either Soviet hegemony or no (or ineffective) world leadership, even if it were to come at the cost of using their nuclear weapons. He would later criticise Stalinist totalitarianism, condemn the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War, and become an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament.
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In 1950, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought". He was also the recipient of the De Morgan Medal (1932), Sylvester Medal (1934), Kalinga Prize (1957), and Jerusalem Prize (1963).
Biography.
Early life and background.
Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born at Ravenscroft, a country house in Trellech, Monmouthshire, on 18 May 1872, into an influential and liberal family of the British aristocracy. His parents were Viscount and Viscountess Amberley. Lord Amberley consented to his wife's affair with their children's tutor, the biologist Douglas Spalding. Both were early advocates of birth control at a time when this was considered scandalous. Lord Amberley, a deist, asked the philosopher John Stuart Mill to act as Russell's secular godfather. Mill died the year after Russell's birth, but his writings later influenced Russell's life.
Russell's paternal grandfather, Lord John Russell, later 1st Earl Russell (1792–1878), had twice been Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the 1840s and 1860s. A member of Parliament since the early 1810s, he met with Napoleon Bonaparte in Elba. The Russells had been prominent in England for several centuries before this, coming to power and the peerage with the rise of the Tudor dynasty (see: Duke of Bedford). They established themselves as one of the leading Whig families and participated in political events from the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536–1540 to the Glorious Revolution in 1688–1689 and the Great Reform Act in 1832.
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Lady Amberley was the daughter of Lord and Lady Stanley of Alderley. Russell often feared the ridicule of his maternal grandmother, one of the campaigners for education of women.
Childhood and adolescence.
Russell had two siblings: brother Frank (seven years older), and sister Rachel (four years older). In June 1874, Russell's mother died of diphtheria, followed shortly by Rachel's death. In January 1876, his father died of bronchitis after a long period of depression. Frank and Bertrand were placed in the care of Victorian paternal grandparents, who lived at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park. His grandfather, former Prime Minister Earl Russell, died in 1878, and was remembered by Russell as a kind old man in a wheelchair. His grandmother, the Countess Russell (née Lady Frances Elliot), was the central family figure for the rest of Russell's childhood and youth.
The Countess was from a Scottish Presbyterian family and petitioned the Court of Chancery to set aside a provision in Amberley's will requiring the children to be raised as agnostics. Despite her religious conservatism, she held progressive views in other areas (accepting Darwinism and supporting Irish Home Rule), and her influence on Bertrand Russell's outlook on social justice and standing up for principle remained with him throughout his life. Her favourite Bible verse, "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil", became his motto. The atmosphere at Pembroke Lodge was one of frequent prayer, emotional repression and formality; Frank reacted to this with open rebellion, but the young Bertrand learned to hide his feelings.
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Russell's adolescence was lonely and he contemplated suicide. He remarked in his autobiography that his interests in "nature and books and (later) mathematics saved me from complete despondency;" only his wish to know more mathematics kept him from suicide. He was educated at home by a series of tutors. When Russell was eleven years old, his brother Frank introduced him to the work of Euclid, which he described in his autobiography as "one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love".
During these formative years, he also discovered the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Russell wrote: "I spent all my spare time reading him, and learning him by heart, knowing no one to whom I could speak of what I thought or felt, I used to reflect how wonderful it would have been to know Shelley, and to wonder whether I should meet any live human being with whom I should feel so much sympathy." Russell claimed that beginning at age 15, he spent considerable time thinking about the validity of Christian religious dogma, which he found unconvincing. At this age, he came to the conclusion that there is no free will and, two years later, that there is no life after death. Finally, at the age of 18, after reading Mill's "Autobiography", he abandoned the "First Cause" argument and became an atheist.
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He travelled to the continent in 1890 with an American friend, Edward FitzGerald, and with FitzGerald's family he visited the Paris Exhibition of 1889 and climbed the Eiffel Tower soon after it was completed.
Education.
Russell won a scholarship to read for the Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, and began his studies there in 1890, taking as coach Robert Rumsey Webb. He became acquainted with the younger George Edward Moore and came under the influence of Alfred North Whitehead, who recommended him to the Cambridge Apostles. He distinguished himself in mathematics and philosophy, graduating as seventh Wrangler in the former in 1893 and becoming a Fellow in the latter in 1895.
Early career.
Russell began his published work in 1896 with "German Social Democracy", a study in politics that was an early indication of his interest in political and social theory. In 1896 he taught German social democracy at the London School of Economics. He was a member of the Coefficients dining club of social reformers set up in 1902 by the Fabian campaigners Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
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He now started a study of the foundations of mathematics at Trinity. In 1897, he wrote "An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry" (submitted at the Fellowship Examination of Trinity College) which discussed the Cayley–Klein metrics used for non-Euclidean geometry. He attended the first International Congress of Philosophy in Paris in 1900 where he met Giuseppe Peano and Alessandro Padoa. The Italians had responded to Georg Cantor, making a science of set theory; they gave Russell their literature including the "Formulario mathematico". Russell was impressed by the precision of Peano's arguments at the Congress, read the literature upon returning to England, and came upon Russell's paradox. In 1903 he published "The Principles of Mathematics", a work on the foundations of mathematics. It advanced a thesis of logicism, that mathematics and logic are one and the same.
At the age of 29, in February 1901, Russell underwent what he called a "sort of mystic illumination", after witnessing Whitehead's wife's suffering in an angina attack. "I found myself filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty and with a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some philosophy which should make human life endurable", Russell would later recall. "At the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely different person."
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In 1905, he wrote the essay "On Denoting", which was published in the philosophical journal "Mind". Russell was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1908. The three-volume "Principia Mathematica", written with Whitehead, was published between 1910 and 1913. This, along with the earlier "The Principles of Mathematics", soon made Russell world-famous in his field. Russell's first political activity was as the Independent Liberal candidate in the 1907 by-election for the Wimbledon constituency, where he was not elected.
In 1910, he became a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, Trinity College, where he had studied. He was considered for a fellowship, which would give him a vote in the college government and protect him from being fired for his opinions, but was passed over because he was "anti-clerical", because he was agnostic. He was approached by the Austrian engineering student Ludwig Wittgenstein, who started undergraduate study with him. Russell viewed Wittgenstein as a successor who would continue his work on logic. He spent hours dealing with Wittgenstein's various phobias and his bouts of despair. This was a drain on Russell's energy, but Russell continued to be fascinated by him and encouraged his academic development, including the publication of Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" in 1922. Russell delivered his lectures on logical atomism, his version of these ideas, in 1918, before the end of World War I. Wittgenstein was, at that time, serving in the Austrian Army and subsequently spent nine months in an Italian prisoner of war camp at the end of the conflict.
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First World War.
During World War I, Russell was one of the few people to engage in active pacifist activities. In 1916, due to his absence of allegiance to the war effort, he was dismissed from Trinity College following his conviction under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914. He later described this, in "Free Thought and Official Propaganda", as an illegitimate means the state used to violate freedom of expression. Russell championed the case of Eric Chappelow, a poet jailed and abused as a conscientious objector. Russell played a part in the "Leeds Convention" in June 1917, a historic event which saw well over a thousand "anti-war socialists" gather; many being delegates from the Independent Labour Party and the Socialist Party, united in their pacifist beliefs and advocating a peace settlement. The international press reported that Russell appeared with a number of Labour Members of Parliament (MPs), including Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden, as well as former Liberal MP and anti-conscription campaigner, Professor Arnold Lupton. After the event, Russell told Lady Ottoline Morrell that, "to my surprise, when I got up to speak, I was given the greatest ovation that was possible to give anybody".
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His conviction in 1916 resulted in Russell being fined £100 (), which he refused to pay in the hope that he would be sent to prison, but his books were sold at auction to raise the money. The books were bought by friends; he later treasured his copy of the King James Bible that was stamped "Confiscated by Cambridge Police".
A later conviction for publicly lecturing against inviting the United States to enter the war on the United Kingdom's side resulted in six months' imprisonment in Brixton Prison (see "Bertrand Russell's political views") in 1918 (he was prosecuted under the Defence of the Realm Act) He later said of his imprisonment:
While he was reading Strachey's "Eminent Victorians" chapter about Gordon he laughed out loud in his cell prompting the warder to intervene and reminding him that "prison was a place of punishment".
Russell was reinstated to Trinity in 1919, resigned in 1920, was Tarner Lecturer in 1926 and became a Fellow again in 1944 until 1949.
In 1924, Russell again gained press attention when attending a "banquet" in the House of Commons with well-known campaigners, including Arnold Lupton, who had been an MP and had also endured imprisonment for "passive resistance to military or naval service".
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G. H. Hardy on the Trinity controversy.
In 1941, G. H. Hardy wrote a 61-page pamphlet titled "Bertrand Russell and Trinity" (published later as a book by Cambridge University Press with a foreword by C. D. Broad) in which he gave an authoritative account of Russell's 1916 dismissal from Trinity College, explaining that a reconciliation between the college and Russell had later taken place and gave details about Russell's personal life. Hardy writes that Russell's dismissal had created a scandal since the vast majority of the Fellows of the College opposed the decision. The ensuing pressure from the Fellows induced the Council to reinstate Russell. In January 1920, it was announced that Russell had accepted the reinstatement offer from Trinity and would begin lecturing in October. In July 1920, Russell applied for a one-year leave of absence; this was approved. He spent the year giving lectures in China and Japan. In January 1921, it was announced by Trinity that Russell had resigned and his resignation had been accepted. This resignation, Hardy explains, was voluntary and was not the result of another altercation.
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The reason for the resignation, according to Hardy, was that Russell was going through a tumultuous time in his personal life with a divorce and subsequent remarriage. Russell contemplated asking Trinity for another one-year leave of absence but decided against it since this would have been an "unusual application" and the situation had the potential to snowball into another controversy. Although Russell did the right thing, in Hardy's opinion, the reputation of the College suffered with Russell's resignation since the 'world of learning' knew about Russell's altercation with Trinity but not that the rift had healed. In 1925, Russell was asked by the Council of Trinity College to give the "Tarner Lectures" on the Philosophy of the Sciences; these would later be the basis for one of Russell's best-received books according to Hardy: "The Analysis of Matter", published in 1927. In the preface to the Trinity pamphlet, Hardy wrote:
Between the wars.
In August 1920, Russell travelled to Soviet Russia as part of an official delegation sent by the British government to investigate the effects of the Russian Revolution. He wrote a four-part series of articles, titled "Soviet Russia—1920", for the magazine "The Nation". He met Vladimir Lenin and had an hour-long conversation with him. In his autobiography, he mentions that he found Lenin disappointing, sensing an "impish cruelty" in him and comparing him to "an opinionated professor". He cruised down the Volga on a steamship. His experiences destroyed his previous tentative support for the revolution. He subsequently wrote a book, "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism", about his experiences on this trip, taken with a group of 24 others from the UK, all of whom came home thinking well of the Soviet regime, despite Russell's attempts to change their minds. For example, he told them that he had heard shots fired in the middle of the night and was sure that these were clandestine executions, but the others maintained that it was only cars backfiring.
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Russell's lover Dora Black, a British author, feminist and socialist campaigner, visited Soviet Russia independently at the same time; in contrast to his reaction, she was enthusiastic about the Bolshevik revolution.
The following year, Russell, accompanied by Dora, visited Peking (as Beijing was then known outside of China) to lecture on philosophy for a year. He went with optimism and hope, seeing China as then being on a new path. Other scholars present in China at the time included John Dewey and Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian Nobel-laureate poet. Before leaving China, Russell became gravely ill with pneumonia, and incorrect reports of his death were published in the Japanese press. When the couple visited Japan on their return journey, Dora took on the role of spurning the local press by handing out notices reading "Mr. Bertrand Russell, having died according to the Japanese press, is unable to give interviews to Japanese journalists". Apparently they found this harsh and reacted resentfully. Russell supported his family during this time by writing popular books explaining matters of physics, ethics, and education to the layman.
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From 1922 to 1927 the Russells divided their time between London and Cornwall, spending summers in Porthcurno. In the 1922 and 1923 general elections Russell stood as a Labour Party candidate in the Chelsea constituency, but only on the basis that he knew he was unlikely to be elected in such a safe Conservative seat, and he was unsuccessful on both occasions.
After the birth of his two children, he became interested in education, especially early childhood education. He was not satisfied with the old traditional education and thought that progressive education also had some flaws; as a result, together with Dora, Russell founded the experimental Beacon Hill School in 1927. The school was run from a succession of different locations, including its original premises at the Russells' residence, Telegraph House, near Harting, West Sussex. During this time, he published "On Education, Especially in Early Childhood". On 8 July 1930, Dora gave birth to her third child Harriet Ruth. After he left the school in 1932, Dora continued it until 1943.
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