Algebra is an Arabic word. To understand its origin, we must go back to the time and place of the Arabian Nights, during the Islamic Golden Age, when the Islamic Empire was transformed into a military and scientific world power. That was the time when Caliph Harun al-Rashid ruled in Baghdad, the capital of the empire. It was the age, so masterfully described in the tales of Scheherazade, the heroine of Arabian Nights, when the Arab world was the realm where reality and magic seemed to meet.
If you’re having trouble sleeping at night, have you tried to induce total existential dread by contemplating the end of the entire Universe?
If not, here’s a rundown of five ideas exploring how “all there is” might become “nothing at all.”
Enjoy.
The last time I was in Siena there was an earthquake. The first time I was nineteen. My boyfriend, who had already graduated from college, had been in Italy most of the year, in Perugia. The plan was to take an intensive course in Italian—he wanted to read Dante—but then he discovered a passion for painting. Could it have been the day after I arrived that we took the train from Perugia to Siena? Even now, from Perugia, one changes train twice, first in Terontola, and then at Chiusi-Chianciano Terme, a station that decades later would become familiar, arriving in the Val D’Orcia from Rome, and where one afternoon we sat deathly ill in the station bar, beset by what—an ability to go on? But then everything was new.
Albuquerque-born author Kyle Paoletta takes readers on a virtual road trip around his native region, transporting us across hundreds of years and thousands of miles in his new book “American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest.”
As cities worldwide grapple with drought and rising temperatures from climate change, Paoletta describes how the Southwest developed a resilience that he says other regions will need as the globe grows hotter and drier.