This paper frames calculus as a global, centuries-long development rather than a subject that began only with Newton and Leibniz. Drawing on ideas from Greek, Indian, Islamic, and later European mathematics, it highlights how concepts like infinity, area, motion, and continuous change slowly evolved through solving problems and cultural exchange. I argue that bringing this history into the classroom helps students see calculus as more than a set of procedures: it becomes a story of human creativity and persistence. By revisiting the questions early mathematicians struggled with, students can better appreciate and better understand the core ideas behind the formulas they use today.
A lenta utilização da receita consignada do Fundo de Viação Municipal gerou saldos com algum significado financeiro, que as administrações municipais foram usando, motivadas e autorizadas pelos sucessivos governos, para outros fins, sobretudo a partir de 1892, o que coincide, não por acaso, com a crise do final da Monarquia Constitucional. Os municípios reagiram positivamente à possibilidade aberta pelos governos e são sobretudo os concelhos do interior do território que mais recorrem a esta possibilidade, mas seria um erro concluir que esta é uma prática das pequenas circunscrições. Os montantes solicitados são tendencialmente baixos, mas permitiam ou o investimento total necessário à intervenção que se pretendia realizar ou para ela contribuíam significativamente. As câmaras municipais privilegiaram áreas de investimento como o abastecimento de água, os Paços do Concelho, a salubridade dos espaços públicos, os cemitérios ou os matadouros. Embora não se possa concluir que este investimento conduziu a uma completa revitalização das economias locais, é claro que ele contribuiu para alguma melhoria das condições da vida local.
This article examines the unsuccessful attempts made by a group of Catalan and Spanish exiled composers (Roberto Gerhard, Baltasar Samper, Josep Valls and Óscar Esplá) to reconstruct the Spanish and Catalan delegations of the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM) in exile, during the second half of the 1940s. This episode is enormously valuable and revealing if we analyze it, as the article does, within two historical contexts: firstly, the history of the ISCM in Spain, and in particular the efforts that the republican government made to ensure that its country was still present at ISCM festivals during the Civil War, in an attempt to guarantee that the cultural legitimacy of Spain remained on the exile side, at a time when the Franco regime threatened to appropriate it. Secondly, we can observe parallels between this correspondence and other episodes of the Spanish musical exile in the period 1945-1950 which suggests that Spanish and Catalan music also engaged in a generalized reorientation of their strategies of resistance/adaptation
In late nineteenth century and in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Portugal witnessed a modest industrial growth. This industrialisation process was recorded by thousands of photographs, many of which were published in the illustrated press. In this article, I analyse how Portuguese industry was represented by photography and how that representation was disseminated nationwide through the publication of photographs in the two most important illustrated magazines of that period: O Occidente and Illustração Portugueza. I rely on a methodology combining semiotics with discourse analysis in journalism. I show that both magazines built an industrial landscape of modernity and progress, which did not coincide with the real condition of Portuguese industry. I add to the discussion advocating photography as an historical source, arguing that it is much more than a mere illustrative support, but a reliable primary source, with a high potential for history in general, and for the fields of business and industrial history in particular, in the sense that photography can provide fresh narratives around technological change.
Elisabete Malafaia, Pedro Mocho, Fernando Escaso
et al.
The first paleontological works on Mesozoic vertebrates from Portugal, carried out from the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, provided the discovery of significant collections of vertebrate fossils. These collections are particularly relevant because they include several specimens collected from different regions of the Lusitanian Basin (some of the sites are currently inaccessible), whose fossil record is poorly known. Theropod remains are relatively scarce and generally consist of fragmentary material, mostly assigned to the megalosaurid Megalosaurus from the Middle Jurassic of England, the first dinosaur to be named and a “wastebasket” taxon used by many scientists to identify theropod material. The studied fossils mostly consist of isolated teeth and vertebrae collected from Upper Jurassic levels of the coastal region, with also some material from Lower and Upper Cretaceous strata from the central and northern sectors of the Lusitanian Basin. Here specimens attributed to Megalosaurus from different Portuguese institutions are reviewed and their taxonomic affinity and stratigraphic context are updated. Most specimens actually belong to different theropod groups, including several isolated teeth from different Upper Jurassic localities here assigned to Ceratosaurus, Torvosaurus, and Allosaurus, as well as an isolated tooth from the Lower Cretaceous that is attributed to an indeterminate allosauroid. Other theropod remains consist mostly of vertebral fragments of indeterminate avetheropods and allosauroids. Elements of other dinosaur groups are also represented, including a few vertebrae here referred to stegosaurians and iguanodontians, as well as a vertebra and some appendicular remains attributed to sauropods. Two vertebrae assigned to thalattosuchians were also identified. The study of this collection allows to better characterize the diversity of Late Jurassic dinosaur faunas from different areas of the Lusitanian Basin and provides some data on the poorly known Cretaceous fossil record of theropods from Portugal.
This paper provides an overview of recent historical research regarding scientifically-informed challenges to the idea that the stars are other suns orbited by other inhabited earths -- an idea that came to be known as "the Plurality of Worlds". Johannes Kepler in the seventeenth century, Jacques Cassini in the eighteenth, and William Whewell in the nineteenth each argued against "pluralism" based on what in their respective times was solid science. Nevertheless, pluralism remained popular despite these and other scientific challenges. This history will be of interest to the astronomical community so that it is better positioned to avoid difficulties should the historical trajectory of pluralism continue, especially as it persists in the popular imagination.
Este estudo procura analisar e refletir acerca do diálogo intercientífico entre a Paleografia e a Ciência da Informação. Para tal, segue uma abordagem de natureza qualitativa, suportada pelo método da Investigação Documental, quer para a revisão da literatura, quer para a pesquisa e análise da informação, de modo a aferir a existência desse diálogo em estudos no âmbito da Ciência da Informação, bem como na oferta formativa nos curricula dos cursos de Ciência da Informação, em Portugal (universidades de Coimbra, Lisboa e Porto), e de 16 cursos de graduação em Arquivologia, no Brasil.
A identificação, a organização e representação da informação relativa aos documentos antigos, pelo arquivista, pelo bibliotecário ou pelo museólogo, exigem o conhecimento dos elementos constitutivos da escrita, a interpretação e a leitura dos documentos, isto é, formação em Paleografia. Hoje, concretiza-se em estudos no âmbito da Ciência da Informação, em que a Paleografia marca presença nos planos curriculares de Ciência da Informação, em Portugal, como opção, e em 14 dos 16 cursos de Arquivologia no Brasil, sendo a sua frequência obrigatória em 12 cursos de graduação.
John Clark was inventor of the Eureka machine to generate hexameter Latin verse. He labored for 13 years from 1832 to implement the device that could compose at random over 26 million different lines of well-formed verse. This paper proposes that Clark should be regarded as an early cognitive scientist. Clark described his machine as an illustration of a theory of "kaleidoscopic evolution" whereby the Latin verse is "conceived in the mind of the machine" then mechanically produced and displayed. We describe the background to automated generation of verse, the design and mechanics of Eureka, its reception in London in 1845 and its place in the history of language generation by machine. The article interprets Clark's theory of kaleidoscopic evolution in terms of modern cognitive science. It suggests that Clark has not been given the recognition he deserves as a pioneer of computational creativity.
The Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), a premier autonomous research institute under the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India has a legacy of about seven decades with contributions made in the field of observational sciences namely atmospheric and astrophysics. The Survey of India used a location at ARIES, determined with an accuracy of better than 10 meters on a world datum through institute participation in a global network of Earth artificial satellites imaging during late 1950. Taking advantage of its high-altitude location, ARIES, for the first time, provided valuable input for climate change studies by long term characterization of physical and chemical properties of aerosols and trace gases in the central Himalayan regions. In astrophysical sciences, the institute has contributed precise and sometime unique observations of the celestial bodies leading to a number of discoveries. With the installation of the 3.6 meter Devasthal optical telescope in the year 2015, India became the only Asian country to join those few nations of the world who are hosting 4 meter class optical telescopes. This telescope, having advantage of geographical location, is well-suited for multi-wavelength observations and for sub-arc-second resolution imaging of the celestial objects including follow-up of the GMRT, AstroSat and gravitational-wave sources.
ABSTRACT A program to support historical shops was recently created in Lisbon; called ‘Lojas com História’, it was later extended to other cities in the country. This paper shows the changes in public policy towards retail in Portugal where one finds an evolution from purely government regulation to a policing context aiming to strengthen competition between businesses, which endowed the sector with a growing role both in city policy and planning, and competition between cities. The evolution of policies reflects an increased focus on place with a shift from the support to commercial units, to strengthen their competitiveness, to their valorisation in the context of competition between cities. On the other hand, it is argued that this evolution is linked to the reinforcement of entrepreneurship in urban management. After recalling the social and spatial functions of retail and the changes in policies towards retail, we present the program and some characteristics of the shops covered by this program in Lisbon, followed by a first review and considerations on the challenges it brings.
One of the variants for systematizing the activities of the historian of mathematics is proposed, as well as a scheme for organizing research and search work in the preparation of scientific articles and reports on the history of science.
This paper discusses the relation between the decoherent histories approach to quantum mechanics that is based on coarse-grained decoherent histories of a closed system, and the approximate quantum mechanics of measured subsystems, as in the Copenhagen interpretation. We show how the a classical world used in such formulations is not to something to be postulated but rather explained by suitable sets of alternative histories of quasiclassical variables. We discuss the general definition of measurement, the collapse of the wave function, and irreversibility from the perspective of decoherent histories quantum theory..
The present study analyzes conceptual and aesthetic consequences of the notion of “precarious life” (Butler, 2004) in terms of a post-anthropocentric reorganization of sensibility. It does so from two fundamental vectors: the reorganization of temporalities and the post-anthropocentric impulse that, as it is argued here, are contained in the concept of precarity. The essay focuses on the film La mujer de los perros (2015), by Laura Citarella and Verónica Llinás, that revolves around a human-animal community as a motif from which the precarious condition is explored as a terrain of disputes and reappropriations. In this exploration, the tension between “human” and “living” emerges as a decisive point of reflection on the precarious condition.
This article contributes to a global history of relativity, by exploring how Einstein's theory was appropriated in Belgium. This may sound as a contradiction in terms, yet the early-twentieth-century Belgian context, because of its cultural diversity and reflectiveness of global conditions (the principal example being the First World War), proves well-suited to expose transnational flows and patterns in the global history of relativity. The attempts of Belgian physicist Théophile de Donder to contribute to relativity physics during the 1910s and 1920s illustrate the role of the war in shaping the transnational networks through which relativity circulated. The local attitudes of conservative Belgian Catholic scientists and philosophers, who denied that relativity was philosophically significant, exemplify a global pattern: while critics of relativity feared to become marginalized by the scientific, political, and cultural revolutions that Einstein and his theory were taken to represent, supporters sympathized with these revolutions.
ABSTRACT In 1940, the Portuguese government approved a massive primary school construction plan that projected a 60 per cent increase in the number of primary schools. Based on the collection of a new dataset, we describe literacy levels in Portugal prior to the plan as well as the plan's strategy regarding the location of schools. We then estimate the causal impact of the increase in the number of schools between 1940 and the early 60s on enrolment and literacy, all at the county level. We conclude the increase in the number of schools was responsible for 80 per cent of the increase in enrolment and 13 per cent of the increase in the literacy rate of the affected cohorts.
The sexual abuse of animals has persisted prehistoric times and is currently studied in the disciplines of history, medicine, psychiatry, veterinary medicine and law. The Portuguese legislation has no explicit reference to sexual contact with animals and the Spanish legislation had recently added “sexual exploitation of animals” which could be interpreted as implying the element of profit. The principal aim of this thesis is to prove that cases of animal sexual abuse in Portugal and Spain are not so infrequent as we may believe. We aim to establish the incidence and frequency of cases of sexual abuse detected by veterinarians in Portugal and Spain and to show that people are actively searching for zoophilic content online in these two countries. An online survey was made and directed to Spanish and Portuguese veterinarians. Our results left no doubt about the existence of such abuses in Portugal and Spain (8.2% of veterinarians in our study had encountered or at least suspected of cases of sexual abuse). Moreover, our analyses via Google Trends proved that people are currently looking for zoophilic content online. With that said, we hope to authenticate the urgent need to change legislation to protect the victims of these abuses and to encourage other investigators to focus on this neglected subject.
Maria Prata-Sena, Bruno Castro-Carvalho, Sandra Nunes
et al.
Port wine is an internationally acclaimed fortified wine produced in Douro Demarcated Region (DDR) in Portugal, and recognized with protected designation of origin. This review represents a compilation of the known chromatic and aromatic descriptors of Port wine. A comprehensive review of literature is performed regarding the influence of geography, climate, soil, grapevine cultivars, and vitivinicultural practices on the unique Port wine attributes. This manuscript provides an extensive insight regarding the different aspects that influence the quality and uniqueness of Port wine, especially its main sensory attributes: colour, aroma, and flavour. Its main goal is to assess the importance of the DDR as a unique and defined terroir that ensures quality and confers authenticity.