title: Laird Hamilton

text: Laird John Hamilton (born March 2, 1964) is an American big-wave surfer, co-inventor of tow-in surfing, and an occasional fashion and action-sports model and actor. He is married to Gabrielle Reece, a professional volleyball player, television personality, and model.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Laird was born Laird John Zerfas in San Francisco on March 2, 1964, in an experimental salt-water sphere at UCSF Medical Center designed to ease the mother's labor. His father, L. G. Zerfas, left the family before his first birthday. While he was an infant, Laird and his mother, Joann (née Zyirek), moved to Hawaii. In 1967, while still a young boy living on Oahu, Laird met with 1960s surfer William Stuart "Bill" Hamilton, a bachelor at the time, on Pūpūkea beach on the North Shore. Bill Hamilton was a surfboard shaper and glasser on Oahu in the 1960s and 1970s and owned a small business handmaking custom, high-performance surfboards for the Oahu North Shore big wave riders of the era. The two became immediate companions. The young Laird invited Bill Hamilton home to meet his mother. Bill Hamilton married Laird's then-single mother, becoming Laird's adoptive father.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: The family later moved to a remote valley on Kauai island. Joann and Bill had a second son, Lyon, Laird's half-brother, who also became a surfer. Laird's mother died of a brain aneurysm in 1997.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Hamilton had a reputation for an aggressive demeanor around others of his age. The role of the outsider profoundly affected Laird through to his teen years and early adult life. He became used to this role and was uncomfortable being in the center of anything. He was also known for his physical and mental toughness.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Young Laird is shown in early video footage jumping off a 60-foot cliff into deep water at 7 years of age.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: When 16, Hamilton left the eleventh grade at Kapaa High School to pursue a modeling career and work in construction. At 17, Hamilton was discovered on a beach in Kauai by a photographer from the Italian "Men's Vogue" magazine "L'Uomo Vogue" which landed him a modeling contract and later a 1983 photo shoot with the actress Brooke Shields. Hamilton continued to do occasional men's action sportswear print modeling.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: In 2008 Hamilton announced his own "Wonderwall" line of affordable clothing, sold through Steve & Barry's until that retailer shut down at the end of January 2009.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: By the age of 17, Hamilton had become an accomplished surfer and could have left modeling to pursue a career on surfing's World Championship Tour. However, competitive surfing and contests never appealed to Hamilton, who had watched his father Bill endure the competitive surfing contest politics and the random luck of the waves in organized championship surfing events. Bill Hamilton regarded surfing more as a work of art, rather than based chiefly on wave-by-wave ride performance scored by judges.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Despite further success in modeling during the 1980s, Hamilton, with his professional surfing upbringing, always intended a life of surfing, but continued to reject the professional contest circuit.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: An early attempt at media recognition was his quest to be the first surfer to complete a 360 degree loop while strapped to his board. The attempt was chronicled in Greg Stump's 1990 ski film, "Groove - Requiem in the key of Ski". In the early 1990s, Hamilton, along with a small group of friends collectively dubbed the "Strapped Crew" because their feet were strapped to their boards, pushed the boundaries of surfing at Jaws surf break off the north central coast of Maui. The Strapped Crew tackled bigger waves featuring stunts. Stunts included: launching jumps on sailboards, then mating the boards to paragliders to experiment with some of the earliest kiteboards.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: In late 1992, Hamilton with two of his close friends, big wave riders Darrick Doerner and Buzzy Kerbox (also an occasional men's fashion model; Hamilton and Kerbox later lost their friendship over a property disagreement), started using inflatable boats to tow one another into waves which were too big to catch under paddle power alone. This innovation is chronicled in the documentary film, "Riding Giants". The technique would later be modified to use personal water craft and become a popular innovation. Tow-in surfing, as it became known, pushed the confinements and possibilities of big wave surfing to a new level. Although met with mixed reactions from the surfing community, some of whom felt that it was cheating and polluting, Hamilton explained that tow-in surfing was the only way to catch the monstrous sized waves. Using tow-in surfing methods, Hamilton learned how to survive waves and carving arcs across walls of water.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Hamilton appeared as Kevin Costner's stunt double during the 1995 filming of "Waterworld". Reportedly, Hamilton was nearly lost at sea when his Kawasaki Jet Ski ran out of fuel during a squall. He then drifted for hours before being rescued by Coast Guard off the Island of Maui. Hamilton commuted daily to the enclosed set between Maui and the Big Island by jet ski.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Hamilton met women's professional volleyball player and New York fashion model Gabrielle Reece in Maui in 1995 after a television interview by Reece, who was hosting the show 'The Extremists'. People magazine named him one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World the following year, and he pushed for and took from his future wife the correspondent position for the syndicated cable series 'The Extremists'. They later married on November 30, 1997. In 1989 Reece had been named by "Elle" magazine as one of the Five Most Beautiful Women in the World.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: By the late 1990s, Hamilton continued with windsurfing, waterskiing and kitesurfing. In 1996 Hamilton and Manu Bertin were instrumental in demonstrating and popularizing kitesurfing off the Hawaiian coast of Maui.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: In 1999 Hamilton sailed his windsurfer between the Hawaiian islands of Oahu and Kauai, some fifty miles away, in just under six hours.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Hamilton has also experimented with the foilboard, an innovative surfboard which incorporates hydrofoil technology allowing a higher degree of precision and effectiveness of aerial techniques within the water. He has become a proponent of Stand up paddle surfing, an ancient Hawaiian technique that requires a longboard and a long-handled paddle, as well as considerable skill, strength and agility. Purist surfers have blasted him for this, but Hamilton calls it a return to the traditional Hawaiian way of surfing, as practiced by King Kamehameha I and his queen Kaahumanu almost three hundred years ago.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Hamilton's drop into Tahiti's Teahupoo break on the morning of August 17, 2000 firmly established him in the recorded history of surfing.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Teahupoo is a particularly hazardous shallow-water reef break on the southeast coast of the Pacific Island of Tahiti.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: On that day, with a larger than normal ocean swell, Darrick Doerner piloted the watercraft, towing Hamilton. Pulling in and releasing the tow rope, Hamilton drove down into the well of the wave's enormous tunnel vortex, in full view of boat-based photographers' and videographers' cameras. With his signature artistic flair, Hamilton continued deeply carving water, emerging back over the wave's shoulder. A still photograph of him riding the wave made the cover of "Surfer" magazine, with the caption: "oh my god..." The wave became known as "the heaviest ever ridden".


title: Laird Hamilton

text: In the filmed coverage of this event in the motion picture "Riding Giants", Doerner said "I towed him onto this wave. And it was to the point where I almost said 'Don't let go of the rope,' and when I looked back he was gone."


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Speaking about the ride to action sports and adventure website Mpora, Laird said: “That was all about faith. Believing I could. That wave in Teahupo’o was a wave we didn’t know existed. We hadn’t seen waves like that. In my world, when I was a kid, I went to every surf movie, I knew all of the best surfers in the world, I was in the middle of all it… but a wave like that did not exist, and the ability to ride that wave in any form didn’t exist either."


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Hamilton is regarded by surfing historians as the "all time best of the best" at big wave surfing, regularly surfing swells of 35 feet (11 m) tall, and moving at speeds in excess of an hour and successfully riding other waves of up to high, at up to 50 mph (80 km/h).


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Hamilton prefers tow-in surfing the giant waves of Peahi reef (known as the Jaws surf break) on the north central shore of the Island of Maui.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: On December 3, 2007, when Brett Lickle was towing Hamilton into a wave on the Maui north shore, called "Egypt", a wave knocked Lickle from the watercraft.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: The fin sliced Lickle, causing him to bleed into the sea, which he feared would attract sharks. Hamilton swam to recover the watercraft, found Lickle in the surf, fashioned his swimsuit into a cloth tourniquet, and applied it to Lickle to save his life. Hamilton then piloted the watercraft back to a landing, where Lickle was immediately taken to a hospital for treatment. Brett recalled that day for Chris Dixon that Brett towed Laird into a wave that was in his opinion "better than 10 stories tall" and the biggest wave ever ridden. That means over 100 feet tall. It was not photographed and therefore not officially recognized by the XXL judges.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: In February 2008 Hamilton joined the board of directors of H2O Audio, a watersports music company in San Diego California. He had used H2O Audio products on many of his long distance paddling endeavors before joining the company.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Later in 2008 he published a book which he describes as not an autobiography, but discussing his philosophy of life.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: On August 27, 2014, Hamilton was in the news again for riding waves and boards which few others dared. Hurricane Marie caused Southern California to be hit with a swell of extreme size—triple over head (and larger) waves could be found from San Diego to Los Angeles, including Laird's home break at Malibu. Late in the day, on a stand-up paddle board, Hamilton dropped into one of the largest waves of the day and proceeded to "shoot" the Malibu beach pier at an extremely high speed.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Despite being one of the best known surfers since the time of Duke Kahanamoku, the matured Hamilton avoids self-promotion. He serves as an ambassador of surfing and watersports and occasional lifeguard to other tow-in surfers.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Hamilton is also an environmental activist. He joined a protest in Malibu against a proposed plant, which would affect the quality of the local waters. Other celebrities attended the event, including Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry and Ted Danson.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: In April 2018, Laird made worldwide news for voluntarily rescuing people around Kauai, Hawaii from devastating, record-breaking storms that were causing flooding. Laird, who lives on the island and used his own boat, has assisted many families in evacuating the island from the flooding, and is being hailed a hero.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Laird Hamilton is a co-founder and co-creator of XPT Life or Extreme Performance Training, along with his wife, Gabrielle Reece.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Laird Hamilton, along with Paul Hodge and Gabrielle Reece, co-founded Laird Superfood in 2015. In September 2020 the company went public on the NYSE under the id LSF.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Hamilton and second wife Gabrielle Reece have two daughters together. Hamilton and his family split their time between residences in Kauai, Hawaii, and Malibu, California. Hamilton and Reece have been described as part of the "Malibu Mob", a celebrity group in the same vein as the Brat Pack. Other Malibu Mob members include Chris Chelios, John Cusack, Kelsey Grammer, John C. McGinley, Tony Danza, Justin Long, Ed O'Neill, John McEnroe, and formerly Max Wright.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Hamilton was featured in American Express credit card television commercials; an early 2000s commercial in the series "Hi, you probably wouldn't recognize my name . . . " and more recently in the American Express "My life, my card" commercial series.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Hamilton was a central figure in the 2004 documentary "Riding Giants" about giant wave surfing; and the opening sequence of the 2002 James Bond movie "Die Another Day", as Pierce Brosnan's big-wave surfing double (shared with Dave Kalama). He appeared in "Waterworld", as Kevin Costner's stunt double in numerous water scenes.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: In October 2006, Hamilton and Dave Kalama biked and paddled the entire Hawaiian Island chain—more than 450 miles—in a week. The feat was featured on Don King's film, "A Beautiful Son", in support of those afflicted with autism.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: In 2007, Hamilton, along with his wife Gabrielle Reece, appeared in the ABC reality television series "", featuring a dozen celebrities in a stock car racing competition. In the first round of competition, Hamilton matched up against tennis star Serena Williams and former NFL quarterback John Elway. Hamilton was eliminated in episode 5.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: He appeared in the Sundance Channel television show "Iconoclasts" with Eddie Vedder from the popular American rock band Pearl Jam.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Footage of Hamilton is used on the video for "Dayvan Cowboy" from Boards of Canada. In 2003, he was featured in Dana Brown's surf documentary "Step Into Liquid". On January 13, 2010, Hamilton and wife Reece appeared as themselves on the episode "Gary Feels Tom Slipping Away" of the CBS television series "Gary Unmarried".


title: Laird Hamilton

text: He was a special guest star as himself in the animated television show "Phineas and Ferb". He was also interviewed as part of the Australian documentary "".


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Hamilton also was the Celebrity on the Volvo Ocean Race Boat Puma Powered by Berg. He did a spectacular exit off the boat by diving off it as it was at full speed.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: In February 2012, Hamilton was featured in "Oprah Winfrey Network" (OWN)'s production of "Oprah Presents Master Class", in which he shared his life and life philosophies with the audience.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: Hamilton appeared in the Season 11 episode of "Hell's Kitchen", where he taught the red team how to wakeboard as part of their team challenge win.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: In the 2015 film "Point Break", Hamilton played a surf vagabond tossing a tow rope to Utah, played by Luke Bracey.


title: Laird Hamilton

text: A chapter about Hamilton appears in Scott Carney's New York Times bestselling book "What Doesn't Kill Us."


title: Come and take it

text: "Come and take it" is a historic slogan, first used in 480 BC in the Battle of Thermopylae as "Molon labe" by Spartan King Leonidas I as a defiant answer and last stand to the surrender demanded by the Persian Army, and later in 1778 at Fort Morris in the Province of Georgia during the American Revolution, and in 1835 at the Battle of Gonzales during the Texas Revolution.


title: Come and take it

text: Sunbury, Georgia, is now a ghost town, though in the past it was active as a port, located east of Hinesville, Georgia. Fort Morris was constructed in Sunbury by the authority of the Continental Congress. A contingent of British soldiers attempted to take the fort on November 25, 1778. The American contingent at Fort Morris was led by Colonel John McIntosh (c. 1748–1826). The Americans numbered only 127 Continental soldiers plus militiamen and local citizens. The fort itself was crudely constructed and could not have withstood any concerted attack.


title: Come and take it

text: The British commander, Colonel Fuser, demanded Fort Morris' surrender through a written note to the American rebels. Though clearly outnumbered (he had only about 200 men plus artillery), Colonel McIntosh's defiant written response to the British demand included the following line: "As to surrendering the fort, receive this laconic reply: COME AND TAKE IT!". The British declined to attack, in large part due to their lack of intelligence regarding other forces in the area. Colonel Fuser believed a recent skirmish in the area, combined with Colonel McIntosh's bravado, might have reflected reinforcements and so the British withdrew.


title: Come and take it

text: The British returned in January 1779 with a larger force. They later conquered and controlled nearly all of Georgia for the next few years. Col. McIntosh's defiance was one successful and heroic event which inspired the patriots as the War moved to the Carolinas and then north.


title: Come and take it

text: The Fort Morris Historical Marker is on Martin Road, Midway, Georgia. It is located at the visitor center for the Fort Morris Historic Site. The center is located off Fort Morris Road, at the end of the Colonels Island Highway (Georgia Route 38). The marker memorializes the battle and notes the "Come and Take It!" response.


title: Come and take it

text: In recognition of his valor of defending Fort Morris in Sunbury, McIntosh was awarded a sword by the Georgia Legislature with the words "Come and Take It" engraved on the blade. McIntosh later served in the War of 1812 as an American General, still protecting the Georgia coast. He served honorably, receiving honors from the City of Savannah for his service.


title: Come and take it

text: In early January 1831, Green DeWitt wrote to Ramón Músquiz, the top political official of Bexar, and requested armament for defense of the colony of Gonzales. This request was granted by delivery of a small used cannon. The small bronze cannon was received by the colony and signed for on March 10, 1831, by James Tumlinson, Jr. The swivel cannon was mounted to a blockhouse in Gonzales and later was the object of Texas pride.


title: Come and take it

text: At the minor skirmish known as the Battle of Gonzales—the first land battle of the Texas Revolution against Mexico—a small group of Texans successfully resisted the Mexican forces who had orders from Colonel Domingo de Ugartechea to seize their cannon.


title: Come and take it

text: As a symbol of defiance, the Texans had fashioned a flag containing the phrase "come and take it" () along with a black star and an image of the cannon that they had received four years earlier from Mexican officials. This was the same message that was sent to the Mexican government when they told the Texans to return the cannon; lack of compliance with the initial demands led to the failed attempt by the Mexican military to forcefully take back the cannon.


title: Come and take it

text: Replicas of the original flag can be seen in the Texas State Capitol, the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, the Sam Houston State University CJ Center, the University of Texas at El Paso Library, the Marine Military Academy headquarters building, the Hockaday School Hoblitzelle Auditorium, and in Perkins Library at Duke University.


title: Come and take it

text: The Come and Take it flag has been used in many contexts in the 21st century by Second Amendment activists.


title: Come and take it

text: The first-known modified version, from the 1990s, replaces the cannon with an M16 rifle and was displayed at a Bill of Rights rally in Arizona following the announcement by President George H. W. Bush that certain types of firearms and firearms parts would be banned. It was shown at a number of later rallies and campaign events through the late 1990s, and now resides in a private collection.


title: Come and take it

text: In 2002, a version of the flag was created which depicted a Barrett .50 BMG Rifle. Other versions have depicted various firearms, and even other objects dear to the hearts of the flag makers. During the 2000 Stanley Cup Finals at least one Dallas Stars fan had created a replica of the flag with the Stanley Cup replacing the cannon; the Stars were the defending champions that year.


title: Come and take it

text: Rock musician Ted Nugent recorded and released a track in 2021 entitled "Come and Take It" for his 2022 album "Detroit Muscle". Long known for his staunch advocacy of gun rights, the musician also sells autographed "Come and Take It" merchandise on his official website.


title: Decapoda

text: The Decapoda or decapods (literally "ten-footed") are an order of crustaceans within the class Malacostraca, including many familiar groups, such as crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp and prawns. Most decapods are scavengers. The order is estimated to contain nearly 15,000 species in around 2,700 genera, with around 3,300 fossil species. Nearly half of these species are crabs, with the shrimp (about 3,000 species) and Anomura including hermit crabs, porcelain crabs, squat lobsters (about 2500 species) making up the bulk of the remainder. The earliest fossil decapod is the Devonian "Palaeopalaemon".


title: Decapoda

text: Decapods can have as many as 38 appendages, arranged in one pair per body segment. As the name Decapoda (from the Greek , "", "ten", and , "-pod", "foot") implies, ten of these appendages are considered legs. They are the pereiopods, found on the last five thoracic segments. In many decapods, one pair of these "legs" has enlarged pincers, called chelae, with the legs being called chelipeds. In front of the pereiopods are three pairs of maxillipeds that function as feeding appendages. The head has five pairs of appendages, including mouthparts, antennae, and antennules. There are five more pairs of appendages on the abdomen. They are called pleopods. There is one final pair called uropods, which, with the telson, form the tail fan.


title: Decapoda

text: Decapods originated in the Late Ordovician around 455 million years ago, with the Dendrobranchiata (prawns) being the first group to diverge. The remaining group, called Pleocyemata, then diverged between the swimming shrimp groupings and the crawling/walking group called Reptantia, consisting of lobsters and crabs. High species diversification can be traced to the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, which coincides with the rise and spread of modern coral reefs, a key habitat for the decapods.


title: Decapoda

text: Classification within the order Decapoda depends on the structure of the gills and legs, and the way in which the larvae develop, giving rise to two suborders: Dendrobranchiata and Pleocyemata. The Dendrobranchiata consist of prawns, including many species colloquially referred to as "shrimp", such as the "white shrimp", "Litopenaeus setiferus". The Pleocyemata include the remaining groups, including "true shrimp". Those groups that usually walk rather than swim (Pleocyemata, excluding Stenopodidea and Caridea) form a clade called Reptantia.


title: TeX

text: TeX (, see below), stylized within the system as TeX, is a typesetting system which was designed and written by computer scientist and Stanford University professor Donald Knuth and first released in 1978. TeX is a popular means of typesetting complex mathematical formulae; it has been noted as one of the most sophisticated digital typographical systems.


title: TeX

text: TeX is widely used in academia, especially in mathematics, computer science, economics, political science, engineering, linguistics, physics, statistics, and quantitative psychology. It has long since displaced Unix troff, the previously favored formatting system, in most Unix installations. It is also used for many other typesetting tasks, especially in the form of LaTeX, ConTeXt, and other macro packages.


title: TeX

text: TeX was designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody to produce high-quality books with minimal effort, and to provide a system that would give exactly the same results on all computers, at any point in time (together with the Metafont language for font description and the Computer Modern family of typefaces). TeX is free software, which made it accessible to a wide range of users.


title: TeX

text: When the first paper volume of Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming" was published in 1968, it was typeset using hot metal typesetting on a Monotype machine. This method, dating back to the 19th century, produced a "classic style" appreciated by Knuth. When the second edition was published, in 1976, the whole book had to be typeset again because the Monotype technology had been largely replaced by phototypesetting, and the original fonts were no longer available. When Knuth received the galley proofs of the new book on 30 March 1977, he found them inferior. Disappointed, Knuth set out to design his own typesetting system.


title: TeX

text: Knuth saw for the first time the output of a high-quality digital typesetting system, and became interested in digital typography. On 13 May 1977, he wrote a memo to himself describing the basic features of TeX. He planned to finish it on his sabbatical in 1978, but as it happened, the language was not "frozen" (ready to use) until 1989, more than ten years later. Guy Steele happened to be at Stanford during the summer of 1978, when Knuth was developing his first version of TeX. When Steele returned to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that autumn, he rewrote TeX's input/output (I/O) to run under the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) operating system. The first version of TeX, called TeX78, was written in the SAIL programming language to run on a PDP-10 under Stanford's WAITS operating system.


title: TeX

text: For later versions of TeX, Knuth invented the concept of literate programming, a way of producing compilable source code and cross-linked documentation typeset in TeX from the same original file. The language used is called WEB and produces programs in DEC PDP-10 Pascal.


title: TeX

text: TeX82, a new version of TeX rewritten from scratch, was published in 1982. Among other changes, the original hyphenation algorithm was replaced by a new algorithm written by Frank Liang. TeX82 also uses fixed-point arithmetic instead of floating-point, to ensure reproducibility of the results across different computer hardware, and includes a real, Turing-complete programming language, following intense lobbying by Guy Steele. In 1989, Donald Knuth released new versions of TeX and Metafont. Despite his desire to keep the program stable, Knuth realised that 128 different characters for the text input were not enough to accommodate foreign languages; the main change in version 3.0 of TeX (also called TeX90) is thus the ability to work with 8-bit inputs, allowing 256 different characters in the text input. TeX3.0 was released on March 15, 1990.


title: TeX

text: Since version 3, TeX has used an idiosyncratic version numbering system, where updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches . This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. The current version of TeX is 3.141592653; it was last updated in 2021. The design was frozen after version 3.0, and no new feature or fundamental change will be added, so all newer versions will contain only bug fixes. Even though Donald Knuth himself has suggested a few areas in which TeX could have been improved, he indicated that he firmly believes that having an unchanged system that will produce the same output now and in the future is more important than introducing new features. For this reason, he has stated that the "absolutely final change (to be made after my death)" will be to change the version number to , at which point all remaining bugs will become features. Likewise, versions of Metafont after 2.0 asymptotically approach (currently at 2.7182818), and a similar change will be applied after Knuth's death.


title: TeX

text: Since the source code of TeX is essentially in the public domain (see below), other programmers are allowed (and explicitly encouraged) to improve the system, but are required to use another name to distribute the modified TeX, meaning that the source code can still evolve. For example, the Omega project was developed after 1991, primarily to enhance TeX's multilingual typesetting abilities. Knuth created "unofficial" modified versions, such as TeX-XeT, which allows a user to mix texts written in left-to-right and right-to-left writing systems in the same document.


title: TeX

text: In several technical fields such as computer science, mathematics, engineering and physics, TeX has become a de facto standard. Many thousands of books have been published using TeX, including books published by Addison-Wesley, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Oxford University Press, and Springer. Numerous journals in these fields are produced using TeX or LaTeX, allowing authors to submit their raw manuscript written in TeX. While many publications in other fields, including dictionaries and legal publications, have been produced using TeX, it has not been as successful as in the more technical fields, as TeX was primarily designed to typeset mathematics.


title: TeX

text: When he designed TeX, Donald Knuth did not believe that a single typesetting system would fit everyone's needs; instead, he designed many hooks inside the program so that it would be possible to write extensions, and released the source code, hoping that the publishers would design versions tailoring to their own needs. While such extensions have been created (including some by Knuth himself), most people have extended TeX only using macros and it has remained a system associated with technical typesetting.


title: TeX

text: TeX commands commonly start with a backslash and are grouped with curly braces. Almost all of TeX's syntactic properties can be changed on the fly, which makes TeX input hard to parse by anything but TeX itself. TeX is a macro- and token-based language: many commands, including most user-defined ones, are expanded on the fly until only unexpandable tokens remain, which are then executed. Expansion itself is practically free from side effects. Tail recursion of macros takes no memory, and if-then-else constructs are available. This makes TeX a Turing-complete language even at the expansion level. The system can be divided into four levels: in the first, characters are read from the input file and assigned a category code (sometimes called "catcode", for short). Combinations of a backslash (actually, any character of category zero) followed by letters (characters of category 11) or a single other character are replaced by a control-sequence token. In this sense, this stage is like lexical analysis, although it does not form numbers from digits. In the next stage, expandable control sequences (such as conditionals or defined macros) are replaced by their replacement text. The input for the third stage is then a stream of characters (including the ones with special meaning) and unexpandable control sequences (typically assignments and visual commands). Here, the characters get assembled into a paragraph, and TeX's paragraph breaking algorithm works by optimizing breakpoints over the whole paragraph. The fourth stage breaks the vertical list of lines and other material into pages.


title: TeX

text: The TeX system has precise knowledge of the sizes of all characters and symbols, and using this information, it computes the optimal arrangement of letters per line and lines per page. It then produces a DVI file ("DeVice Independent") containing the final locations of all characters. This DVI file can then be printed directly given an appropriate printer driver, or it can be converted to other formats. Nowadays, pdfTeX is often used, which bypasses DVI generation altogether. The base TeX system understands about 300 commands, called "primitives". These low-level commands are rarely used directly by users, and most functionality is provided by format files (predumped memory images of TeX after large macro collections have been loaded). Knuth's original default format, which adds about 600 commands, is Plain TeX. The most widely used format is LaTeX, originally developed by Leslie Lamport, which incorporates document styles for books, letters, slides, etc., and adds support for referencing and automatic numbering of sections and equations. Another widely used format, AMS-TeX, is produced by the American Mathematical Society and provides many more user-friendly commands, which can be altered by journals to fit with their house style. Most of the features of AMS-TeX can be used in LaTeX by using the "AMS packages" (e.g., codice_1, codice_2) and the "AMS document classes" (e.g., codice_3, codice_4). This is then referred to as AMS-LaTeX. Other formats include ConTeXt, used primarily for desktop publishing and written mostly by Hans Hagen at Pragma.


title: TeX

text: This might be in a file "myfile.tex", as ".tex" is a common file extension for plain TeX files. By default, everything that follows a percent sign on a line is a comment, ignored by TeX. Running TeX on this file (for example, by typing tex myfile.tex in a command-line interpreter, or by calling it from a graphical user interface) will create an output file called "myfile.dvi", representing the content of the page in a device independent format (DVI). A DVI file could then be either viewed on screen or converted to a suitable format for any of the various printers for which a device driver existed (printer support was generally not an operating system feature at the time that TeX was created). Knuth has said that there is nothing inherent in TeX that requires DVI as the output format, and later versions of TeX, notably pdfTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX, all support output directly to PDF.


title: TeX

text: TeX provides a different text syntax specifically for mathematical formulas. For example, the quadratic formula (which is the solution of the quadratic equation) appears as:


title: TeX

text: The formula is printed in a way a person would write by hand, or typeset the equation. In a document, entering "mathematics mode" is done by starting with a $ symbol, then entering a formula in TeX syntax, and closing again with another of the same symbol. Knuth explained in jest that he chose the dollar sign to indicate the beginning and end of mathematical mode in plain TeX because typesetting mathematics was traditionally supposed to be expensive. "Display mathematics" (mathematics presented centered on a new line) is similar but uses $$ instead of a single $ symbol. For example, the above with the quadratic formula in display math:


title: TeX

text: The TeX software incorporates several aspects that were not available, or were of lower quality, in other typesetting programs at the time when TeX was released. Some of the innovations are based on interesting algorithms, and have led to several theses for Knuth's students. While some of these discoveries have now been incorporated into other typesetting programs, others, such as the rules for mathematical spacing, are still unique.


title: TeX

text: Since the primary goal of the TeX language is high-quality typesetting for publishers of books, Knuth gave a lot of attention to the spacing rules for mathematical formulae. He took three bodies of work that he considered to be standards of excellence for mathematical typography: the books typeset by the Addison-Wesley Publishing house (the publisher of "The Art of Computer Programming") under the supervision of Hans Wolf; editions of the mathematical journal "Acta Mathematica" dating from around 1910; and a copy of "Indagationes Mathematicae", a Dutch mathematics journal. Knuth looked closely at these printed papers to sort out and look for a set of rules for spacing. While TeX provides some basic rules and the tools needed to specify proper spacing, the exact parameters depend on the font used to typeset the formula. For example, the spacing for Knuth's Computer Modern fonts has been precisely fine-tuned over the years and is now set; but when other fonts, such as AMS Euler, were used by Knuth for the first time, new spacing parameters had to be defined.


title: TeX

text: The typesetting of math in TeX is not without criticism, particularly with respect to technical details of the font metrics, which were designed in an era when significant attention was paid to storage requirements. This resulted in some "hacks" overloading some fields, which in turn required other "hacks". On an aesthetics level, the rendering of radicals has also been criticized. The OpenType math font specification largely borrows from TeX, but has some new features/enhancements.


title: TeX

text: In comparison with manual typesetting, the problem of justification is easy to solve with a digital system such as TeX, which, provided that good points for line breaking have been defined, can automatically spread the spaces between words to fill in the line. The problem is thus to find the set of breakpoints that will give the most visually pleasing result. Many line-breaking algorithms use a "first-fit" approach, where the breakpoints for each line are determined one after the other, and no breakpoint is changed after it has been chosen. Such a system is not able to define a breakpoint depending on the effect that it will have on the following lines. In comparison, the "total-fit" line-breaking algorithm used by TeX and developed by Donald Knuth and Michael Plass considers "all" the possible breakpoints in a paragraph, and finds the combination of line breaks that will produce the most globally pleasing arrangement.


title: TeX

text: Formally, the algorithm defines a value called "badness" associated with each possible line break; the badness is increased if the spaces on the line must stretch or shrink too much to make the line the correct width. Penalties are added if a breakpoint is particularly undesirable: for example, if a word must be hyphenated, if two lines in a row are hyphenated, or if a very loose line is immediately followed by a very tight line. The algorithm will then find the breakpoints that will minimize the sum of squares of the badness (including penalties) of the resulting lines. If the paragraph contains formula_1 possible breakpoints, the number of situations that must be evaluated naively is formula_2. However, by using the method of dynamic programming, the complexity of the algorithm can be brought down to formula_3 (see Big O notation). Further simplifications (for example, not testing extremely unlikely breakpoints such as a hyphenation in the first word of a paragraph, or very overfull lines) lead to an efficient algorithm whose running time is formula_4, where formula_5 is the width of a line. A similar algorithm is used to determine the best way to break paragraphs across two pages, in order to avoid widows or orphans (lines that appear alone on a page while the rest of the paragraph is on the following or preceding page). However, in general, a thesis by Michael Plass shows how the page-breaking problem can be NP-complete because of the added complication of placing figures. TeX's line-breaking algorithm has been adopted by several other programs, such as Adobe InDesign (a desktop publishing application) and the GNU fmt Unix command line utility.


title: TeX

text: If no suitable line break can be found for a line, the system will try to hyphenate a word. The original version of TeX used a hyphenation algorithm based on a set of rules for the removal of prefixes and suffixes of words, and for deciding if it should insert a break between the two consonants in a pattern of the form vowel–consonant–consonant–vowel (which is possible most of the time). TeX82 introduced a new hyphenation algorithm, designed by Frank Liang in 1983, to assign priorities to breakpoints in letter groups. A list of hyphenation patterns is first generated automatically from a corpus of hyphenated words (a list of 50,000 words). If TeX must find the acceptable hyphenation positions in the word "encyclopedia", for example, it will consider all the subwords of the extended word ".encyclopedia.", where "." is a special marker to indicate the beginning or end of the word. The list of subwords includes all the subwords of length 1 (".", "e", "n", "c", "y", etc.), of length 2 (".e", "en", "nc", etc.), etc., up to the subword of length 14, which is the word itself, including the markers. TeX will then look into its list of hyphenation patterns, and find subwords for which it has calculated the desirability of hyphenation at each position. In the case of our word, 11 such patterns can be matched, namely cl, cy, dia, edi, edia, ia, oped, ped, pedi, pedia, yc. For each position in the word, TeX will calculate the "maximum value" obtained among all matching patterns, yielding encyclopedia. Finally, the acceptable positions are those indicated by an odd number, yielding the acceptable hyphenations "en-cy-clo-pe-di-a". This system based on subwords allows the definition of very general patterns (such as ia), with low indicative numbers (either odd or even), which can then be superseded by more specific patterns (such as dia) if necessary. These patterns find about 90% of the hyphens in the original dictionary; more importantly, they do not insert any spurious hyphen. In addition, a list of exceptions (words for which the patterns do not predict the correct hyphenation) are included with the Plain TeX format; additional ones can be specified by the user.


title: TeX

text: Metafont, not strictly part of TeX, is a font description system which allows the designer to describe characters algorithmically. It uses Bézier curves in a fairly standard way to generate the actual characters to be displayed, but Knuth devotes substantial attention to the rasterizing problem on bitmapped displays. Another thesis, by John Hobby, further explores this problem of digitizing "brush trajectories". This term derives from the fact that Metafont describes characters as having been drawn by abstract brushes (and erasers). It is commonly believed that TeX is based on bitmap fonts but, in fact, these programs "know" nothing about the fonts that they are using other than their dimensions. It is the responsibility of the device driver to appropriately handle fonts of other types, including PostScript Type 1 and TrueType. Computer Modern (commonly known as "the TeX font") is freely available in Type 1 format, as are the AMS math fonts. Users of TeX systems that output directly to PDF, such as pdfTeX, XeTeX, or LuaTeX, generally never use Metafont output at all.


title: TeX

text: TeX documents are written and programmed using an unusual macro language. Broadly speaking, the running of this macro language involves expansion and execution stages which do not interact directly. Expansion includes both literal expansion of macro definitions as well as conditional branching, and execution involves such tasks as setting variables/registers and the actual typesetting process of adding glyphs to boxes.


title: TeX

text: The definition of a macro not only includes a list of commands but also the syntax of the call. It differs with most widely used lexical preprocessors like M4, in that the body of a macro gets tokenized at definition time.


title: TeX

text: The TeX macro language has been used to write larger document production systems, most notably including LaTeX and ConTeXt.


title: TeX

text: The original source code for the current TeX software is written in WEB, a mixture of documentation written in TeX and a Pascal subset in order to ensure readability and portability. For example, TeX does all of its dynamic allocation itself from fixed-size arrays and uses only fixed-point arithmetic for its internal calculations. As a result, TeX has been ported to almost all operating systems, usually by using the web2c program to convert the source code into C instead of directly compiling the Pascal code. Knuth has kept a very detailed log of all the bugs he has corrected and changes he has made in the program since 1982; , the list contains 440 entries, not including the version modification that should be done after his death as the final change in TeX. Knuth offers monetary awards to people who find and report a bug in TeX. The award per bug started at US$2.56 (one "hexadecimal dollar") and doubled every year until it was frozen at its current value of $327.68. Knuth has lost relatively little money as there have been very few bugs claimed. In addition, recipients have been known to frame their cheque as proof that they found a bug in TeX rather than cashing it.


title: TeX

text: Due to scammers finding scanned copies of his checks on the internet and using them to try to drain his bank account, Knuth no longer sends out real checks, but those who submit bug reports can get credit at The Bank of San Serriffe instead.


title: TeX

text: TeX is usually provided in the form of an easy-to-install bundle of TeX itself along with Metafont and all the necessary fonts, documents formats, and utilities needed to use the typesetting system. On UNIX-compatible systems, including Linux and Apple macOS, TeX is distributed as part of the larger TeX Live distribution. (Prior to TeX Live, the teTeX distribution was the de facto standard on UNIX-compatible systems.) On Microsoft Windows, there is the MiKTeX distribution (enhanced by proTeXt) and the Microsoft Windows version of TeX Live.


title: TeX

text: Several document processing systems are based on TeX, notably jadeTeX, which uses TeX as a backend for printing from James Clark's DSSSL Engine, the Arbortext publishing system, and Texinfo, the GNU documentation processing system. TeX has been the official typesetting package for the GNU operating system since 1984.


title: TeX

text: Numerous extensions and companion programs for TeX exist, among them BibTeX for bibliographies (distributed with LaTeX), pdfTeX, a TeX-compatible engine which can directly produce PDF output (as well as continuing to support the original DVI output), XeTeX, a TeX-compatible engine that supports Unicode and OpenType, and LuaTeX, a Unicode-aware extension to TeX that includes a Lua runtime with extensive hooks into the underlying TeX routines and algorithms. Most TeX extensions are available for free from CTAN, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network.


title: TeX

text: Donald Knuth has indicated several times that the source code of TeX has been placed into the "public domain", and he strongly encourages modifications or experimentations with this source code. However, since Knuth highly values the reproducibility of the output of all versions of TeX, any changed version must not be called TeX, or anything confusingly similar. To enforce this rule, any implementation of the system must pass a test suite called the TRIP test before being allowed to be called TeX. The question of license is somewhat confused by the statements included at the beginning of the TeX source code, which indicate that "all rights are reserved. Copying of this file is authorized only if ... you make absolutely no changes to your copy". This restriction should be interpreted as a prohibition to change the source code "as long as the file is called tex.web". The copyright note at the beginning of tex.web (and mf.web) was changed in 2021 to explicitly state this. This interpretation is confirmed later in the source code when the TRIP test is mentioned ("If this program is changed, the resulting system should not be called 'TeX). The American Mathematical Society tried in the early 1980s to claim a trademark for TeX. This was rejected because at the time "TEX" (all caps) was registered by Honeywell for the "Text EXecutive" text processing system.


title: TeX

text: It is possible to use TeX for automatic generation of sophisticated layout for XML data. The differences in syntax between the two description languages can be overcome with the help of TeXML. In the context of XML publication, TeX can thus be considered an alternative to XSL-FO. TeX allowed scientific papers in mathematical disciplines to be reduced to relatively small files that could be rendered client-side, allowing fully typeset scientific papers to be exchanged over the early Internet and emerging World Wide Web, even when sending large files was difficult. This paved the way for the creation of repositories of scientific papers such as arXiv, through which papers could be 'published' without an intermediary publisher.


title: TeX

text: The name TeX is intended by its developer to be , with the final consonant of "loch." The letters of the name are meant to represent the capital Greek letters tau, epsilon, and chi, as TeX is an abbreviation of τέχνη ( ), Greek for both "art" and "craft", which is also the root word of "technical". English speakers often pronounce it , like the first syllable of "technical". Knuth instructs that it be typeset with the "E" below the baseline and reduced spacing between the letters. This is done, as Knuth mentions in his "TeXbook", to distinguish TeX from other system names such as TEX, the Text EXecutive processor (developed by Honeywell Information Systems). Fans like to proliferate names from the word "TeX"—such as "TeXnician" (user of TeX software), "TeXhacker" (TeX programmer), "TeXmaster" (competent TeX programmer), "TeXhax", and "TeXnique".


title: TeX

text: Notable entities in the TeX community include the TeX Users Group (TUG), which publishes "TUGboat" and "The PracTeX Journal", covering a wide range of topics in digital typography relevant to TeX. The Deutschsprachige Anwendervereinigung TeX (DANTE) is a large user group in Germany. The TeX Users Group was founded in 1980 for educational and scientific purposes, provides an organization for those who have an interest in typography and font design, and are users of the TeX typesetting system invented by Knuth. The TeX Users Group represents the interests of TeX users worldwide. The TeX Users Group publishes the journal "TUGboat" three times per year; DANTE publishes "" four times per year. Other user groups include DK-TUG in Denmark, in France, GuIT in Italy, NTG in the Netherlands and UK-TUG in the United Kingdom; the user groups jointly maintain a complete list.


title: Mazda MX-5 (NB)

text: The Mazda MX-5 (NB) is the second generation of the Mazda MX-5 manufactured from 1998 until 2005. The model continued the MX-5's philosophy of being a lightweight, front mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive roadster while featuring numerous performance improvements, however lacking its predecessor's retractable headlamps. The NB is also the only generation to feature a factory-built turbocharged variant in the form of the Mazdaspeed MX-5.


title: Mazda MX-5 (NB)

text: The redesigned MX-5 was previewed at the Tokyo Motor Show in October 1997. In February 1998, Mazda released the second-generation MX-5, production code NB, for the 1999 model year. The NB featured a more powerful engine and external styling cues borrowed from the third generation Mazda RX-7, designed in 1995 by Tom Matano. Prices in the United States, the main market for the MX-5, started at US$19,770.


title: Mazda MX-5 (NB)

text: Although many parts of the interior and body were different, the most notable changes were the headlamps: the first generation's retractable headlamps no longer passed pedestrian safety tests and were replaced by fixed ones. The new car grew slightly in width compared to the earlier model and was slightly more aerodynamic than the original, with a . Other notable improvements include a glass rear window with defogger for the convertible top and an optional hinged wind deflector behind the seats.


title: Mazda MX-5 (NB)

text: The NB continued to employ four-wheel independent suspension, with enlarged anti-roll bars at the front and rear, but the wheels, tires and brakes were significantly upgraded: anti-lock braking system was offered as an option; alloy wheels were now 14" (360 mm) or 15" (380 mm) in diameter and 6" (150 mm) in width, depending on the trim package; sports models were equipped with the larger wheels and 195/50VR15 tires.


title: Mazda MX-5 (NB)

text: The BP-4W engine remained at but received several minor updates. The engine compression ratio was raised from 9.0:1 to 9.5:1 by adding slightly domed pistons. The intake cam was changed to a solid lifter design with a stronger cam; the intake runners in the head were straightened and the intake manifold was mounted higher up. Mazda's Variable Intake Control System was introduced, which effectively gave a long narrow intake manifold at low rpm for better swirl, changing to a short, free-flowing manifold at high rpm for maximum breathing. Power output of the new engine was quoted at with of torque.


title: Mazda MX-5 (NB)

text: The B6 engine remained available in Europe and Japan. The base-model NB could reach in 7.8 s and had a top speed of .


title: Mazda MX-5 (NB)

text: In 1999, Mazda celebrated the 10th anniversary of the MX-5 with the 10th Anniversary Model, a limited edition featuring some until-then exclusive features, namely a 6-speed manual transmission and Bilstein shock absorbers; 15 inch polished aluminum wheels with 195/50R15 tires and a very desirable Torsen limited-slip differential. Performance figures were slightly different, with quicker acceleration and higher top speed than the standard 5-speed model. The model's nickname among owners and enthusiasts was 10AM or 10AE (as in "10th Anniversary Edition"). The car had a unique sapphire blue mica (called innocent blue in Japan) paint colour with two-toned black leather and blue Alcantara seats and floor mats, matching 3-spoke Nardi leather wrapped steering wheel and shift knob, BOSE audio system, bright gauge rings, carbon grained center console panel and stainless steel scuff plates. The addition of the sixth gear resulted in different performance results, with 0– in 7.6 seconds, 0.3 seconds faster than the standard 5-speed model, according to "Car and Driver", and 0.4 seconds faster according to "Motor Trend". However, in spite of the 10AM's greater weight, its top rated speed increased from . Combined fuel consumption improved from .


title: Mazda MX-5 (NB)

text: Each car was sequentially numbered on a badge on the driver-side front quarter panel. A "Certificate of Authenticity" with the same number came with each car, signed by Mazda President James E. Miller and dated 10 February 1999. On certain markets, a gift set was also included, consisting of a 1:43 scale diecast model, two Seiko-branded wristwatches (his and hers) with matching blue faceplate and Miata logo, and metal keychain in the form of the Miata logo, all encased in a luxury blue velvet box.


title: Mazda MX-5 (NB)

text: Despite the publicity that Mazda gave to this model, it took more than a year to sell all units, drawing criticism that too many units had been produced (another factor was the high price with an MSRP of $26,875, about $6500 more than a base model). 7,500 units of the 10th Anniversary were produced, with 3,700 distributed to Europe (of which: 600 – UK, 20 – Portugal), 3,150 to North America (of which 3,000 to US and 150 to Canada), 500 to Japan and 150 to Australia, with car number 7,500 being sold in the UK.


title: Mazda MX-5 (NB)

text: Of particular interest for the US models is that they came with Air Conditioning. Random units were equipped with ABS. Approximately 100 units came equipped with the Hard Top option. To set the U.S and Canadian models apart visually, US models were equipped with the Front Dam and Fog lights. Canadian models came equipped with a rear spoiler. For example US #3143 was 50 State emission legal (met California Air Resources Board (CARB) emission requirements), where 49 State emission requirements met Federal (FED) requirements. This unit also was equipped with ABS. Most units in California sold at a "Premium". Depending what option(s) it had, i.e., CARB or FED, ABS and/or Hard Top, premiums of $3,500 to $5,000 were added on. Unit # 3143 had an added premium of $3675, making the selling price $30,550. Vehicle sold in June 1999 for $28,950 without a "Certificate of Authenticity". Beginning in (approximately) 2015, the correct size tire size, 195/50R15, became difficult to find in Northern California. Very few manufacturers sell this size tire anymore.


title: Dolley Madison

text: Dolley Todd Madison (née Payne; May 20, 1768 – July 12, 1849) was the wife of James Madison, the fourth president of the United States from 1809 to 1817. She was noted for holding Washington social functions in which she invited members of both political parties, essentially spearheading the concept of bipartisan cooperation. Previously, founders such as Thomas Jefferson would only meet with members of one party at a time, and politics could often be a violent affair resulting in physical altercations and even duels. Madison helped to create the idea that members of each party could amicably socialize, network, and negotiate with each other without violence. By innovating political institutions as the wife of James Madison, Dolley Madison did much to define the role of the President's spouse, known only much later by the title first lady—a function she had sometimes performed earlier for the widowed Thomas Jefferson.


title: Dolley Madison

text: Madison also helped to furnish the newly constructed White House. When the British set fire to it in 1814, she was credited with saving Gilbert Stuart's classic 1796 portrait of George Washington; she directed her personal slave Paul Jennings to save it. In widowhood, she often lived in poverty aggravated by her son John Payne Todd's alcoholism and mismanagement of their Montpelier plantation. To relieve her debts, she sold off the plantation, its remaining slaves, and her late husband's papers.


title: Dolley Madison

text: Surveys of historians conducted periodically by the Siena College Research Institute since 1982 have consistently found Madison to rank among the six most highly regarded first ladies by the assessments of historians.


title: Dolley Madison

text: Madison was born as Dolley Payne on May 20, 1768, in a log cabin in New Garden, (present-day Greensboro), , to Mary Coles and John Payne Jr. Her parents had married in 1761, uniting two prominent Virginian families. Little is known about the family's life before 1793, when Madison was 25, because few documents have survived; Madison's earliest known letter dates to 1783. Mary Coles was from a Quaker family and two years after their marriage the couple applied for membership in the Ceder Creek meeting. The application was considered for a very lengthy time before they were admitted in 1765. He would become a fervent member of the faith. The family had moved to New Garden, a Quaker community, in 1765. Madison was the family's third child and first daughter. The family had an enslaved nursemaid.


title: Dolley Madison

text: In early 1769, the Paynes returned to Virginia for reasons that are unclear. Historians Catherine Allgor and Richard N. Côté have speculated in their biographical works on her that the family may have wanted to return to their extended family, become uncomfortable with the religion, faced local opposition, or failed at farming or business. Madison would later downplay her North Carolina birth, claiming herself to be a Virginian born when visiting an uncle in North Carolina. The family returned to Cedar Creek, where within four years they had moved at least twice. They eventually settled on a farm several miles outside of Scotchtown. Madison grew up on the farm, working the land with the rest of her family. She was given a strict Quaker upbringing and education, which Côté describes her as "chafing" under.


title: Dolley Madison

text: Madison grew close to her extended family in the area. She had three younger sisters (Lucy, Anna, and Mary) and four brothers (Walter, William Temple, Isaac, and John), two of whom were younger. Her father did not participate in the American Revolutionary War, as his faith practiced pacifism, and Allgor writes that Madison was seemingly little affected by it. By 1783 John Payne had emancipated his slaves, as did numerous slaveholders in the Upper South. Payne, as a Quaker, had long encouraged manumission, but the act was not legal in Virginia until 1782.


title: Dolley Madison

text: When Madison was 15, Payne moved his family to Philadelphia, at the time the second largest American city. They lived at 57 North Third Street, and transferred to the local Northern District Meeting. While living there, Madison often visited Haddonfield, New Jersey, where many Quakers lived. She also met Eliza Collins and Dorothea Abrahams in Philadelphia, with whom she became lifelong friends. During her early years, Payne likely received formal education, though it is not known what this was. Allgor concludes that it was likely better than most Americans at the time, while Côté notes that it was probably "no more than a basic" one. Madison grew into a young woman who Côté writes was described "as one of the fairest of the fair".


title: Dolley Madison

text: Upon the family's move to Philadelphia, John had attempted to build a career as a starch manufacturer, but the business failed in 1789. This was seen as a "weakness" at his Quaker meetings, for which he was expelled. He was devastated by this failure and died on October 24, 1792. Mary Payne initially made ends meet by opening her home as a boardinghouse beginning in 1791. Before his death, John had arranged Madison's marriage to John Todd, a Philadelphia lawyer. According to Allgor, Madison had rejected marriage with Todd previously and John's marriage arrangement was "manipulation". Conversely, Côté considers their marriage to have been "for love, not just duty". They were married on January 7, 1790, at a Quaker meeting house. Madison's friend Eliza Collins was her bridesmaid. The couple moved several blocks away into a high-quality neighborhood.


title: Dolley Madison

text: Madison and Todd had two sons, John Payne (called Payne, born February 29, 1792) and William Temple (born July 4, 1793). According to Allgor, their marriage grew into a "a loving happy partnership." Madison's sister Anna Payne moved in with them.


title: Dolley Madison

text: In August 1793, a yellow fever epidemic broke out in Philadelphia, killing 5,019 people in four months. Madison was hit particularly hard, losing her husband, son William, mother-in-law, and father-in-law. Two of her older brothers died just two years later, and Côté writes that she was "never fully recovered" from the emotional toll of these deaths.


title: Dolley Madison

text: While undergoing the loss of much of her family, she also had to take care of her surviving son without financial support. While her husband had left her money in his will, the executor, her brother-in-law, withheld the funds and she sued him for what she was owed. Aaron Burr, who had once stayed at the boarding house of Madison's mother, assisted her in these efforts, offering legal advice. In a will, written around that time, Burr was named the guardian of Madison's only surviving child.


title: Dolley Madison

text: Madison, at the time named Dolley Todd, soon met James Madison. Their relationship was facilitated by Burr, a longtime friend of Madison. In May 1794, Burr made the formal introduction between the young widow and Madison, who at 43 was a longstanding bachelor 17 years her senior. A brisk courtship followed and, by August, Dolley Madison accepted his marriage proposal. As he was not a Quaker, she was expelled from the Society of Friends for marrying outside her faith, after which Dolley Madison began attending Episcopal services. Despite her Quaker upbringing, there is no evidence that she disapproved of James as a slaveholder. They were married on September 15, 1794, and lived in Philadelphia for the next three years.


title: Dolley Madison

text: In 1797, after eight years in the House of Representatives, James Madison retired from politics. He returned with his family to Montpelier, the Madison family plantation in Orange County, Virginia. There they expanded the house and settled in. When Thomas Jefferson was elected as the third president of the United States in 1800, he asked James Madison to serve as his secretary of state. James Madison accepted and moved with Dolley Madison, her son Payne, her sister Anna, and their domestic slaves to Washington on F Street. They took a large house, as Dolley Madison believed that entertaining would be important in the new capital.


title: Dolley Madison

text: Madison worked with the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe to furnish the White House, the first official residence built for the president of the United States. She sometimes served as widower Jefferson's hostess for official ceremonial functions. Madison would become a crucial part of the Washington social circle, befriending the wives of numerous diplomats like Sarah Martinez de Yrujo, wife of the ambassador of Spain, and Marie-Angelique Turreau, the wife of the French ambassador. Her charm precipitated a diplomatic crisis, called the Merry Affair, after Jefferson escorted Madison to the dining room instead of the wife of Anthony Merry, English diplomat to the U.S., in a major faux pas.


title: Dolley Madison

text: In the approach to the 1808 presidential election, with Thomas Jefferson ready to retire, the Democratic-Republican caucus nominated James Madison to succeed him. He was elected the fourth President of the United States, serving two terms from 1809 to 1817, and Madison became the official White House hostess. Madison had often been the unofficial hostess at the White House during Jefferson's presidency. While the term "first lady" was not yet in use. Madison's role as hostess became official when her own husband assumed the presidency. Madison helped to define the official functions, decorated the Executive Mansion, and welcomed visitors in her drawing room. She was renowned for her social graces and hospitality, and contributed to her husband's popularity as president. She was the only First Lady given an honorary seat on the floor of Congress, and the first American to respond to a telegraph message. In 1812, James was re-elected. Later that year, he delivered a war request to Congress, signalling the beginning of the War of 1812.


title: Dolley Madison

text: After the United States declared war in 1812 and attempted to invade Canada in 1813, a British force attacked Washington in 1814. As it approached and the White House staff hurriedly prepared to flee, Madison ordered her personal slave Paul Jennings to save the Stuart painting, a copy of the Lansdowne portrait, as she wrote in a letter to her sister at 3 o'clock in the afternoon of August 23:


title: Dolley Madison

text: Our kind friend Mr. Carroll has come to hasten my departure, and in a very bad humor with me, because I insist on waiting until the large picture of General Washington is secured, and it requires to be unscrewed from the wall. The process was found too tedious for these perilous moments; I have ordered the frame to be broken and the canvas taken out ... It is done, and the precious portrait placed in the hands of two gentlemen from New York for safe keeping. On handing the canvas to the gentlemen in question, Messrs. Barker and Depeyster, Mr. Sioussat cautioned them against rolling it up, saying that it would destroy the portrait. He was moved to this because Mr. Barker started to roll it up for greater convenience for carrying.


title: Dolley Madison

text: Popular accounts during and after the war years tended to portray Madison as the one who removed the painting, and she became a national heroine. An 1865 memoir by Jennings stated that she had ordered him to save the painting, and that Jean Pierre Sioussat and a gardener, McGraw, were the ones to remove it from the wall. Early twentieth-century historians noted that Sioussat had directed the servants, many of whom were slaves, in the crisis, and that house slaves were the ones who actually preserved the painting.


title: Dolley Madison

text: Dolley Madison hurried away in her waiting carriage, along with other families fleeing the city. They went to Georgetown and the next day they crossed over the Potomac into Virginia. When the couple returned to Washington, the White House was uninhabitable and Dolley and James Madison moved into The Octagon House.


title: Dolley Madison

text: On April 6, 1817, a month after his retirement from the presidency, Dolley and James Madison returned to the Montpelier plantation in Orange County, Virginia.


title: Dolley Madison

text: In 1830, Madison's son Payne Todd, who had never found a career, went to debtors' prison in Philadelphia and the Madisons sold land in Kentucky and mortgaged half of the Montpelier plantation to pay his debts.


title: Dolley Madison

text: James died at Montpelier on June 28, 1836. He was 85 years old. Madison remained at Montpelier for a year. Her niece Anna Payne moved in with her, and Todd came for a lengthy stay. During this time, Madison organized and copied her husband's papers. Congress authorized $55,000 as payment for editing and publishing seven volumes of the Madison papers, including his unique notes on the 1787 convention.


title: Dolley Madison

text: In the fall of 1837, Madison returned to Washington, charging Todd with the care of the plantation. She and her sister Anna moved into a house, bought by Anna and her husband Richard Cutts, on Lafayette Square. Madison took Paul Jennings with her as a butler, and he was forced to leave his wife and children in Virginia.


title: Dolley Madison

text: While Dolley Madison was living in Washington, Payne Todd was unable to manage the plantation, due to alcoholism and related illness. She tried to raise money by selling the rest of the president's papers, but was unable to find a buyer. Jennings attempted to negotiate purchasing his freedom; she had previously written a will in 1841 which would free Jennings after her death, though not her other slaves. She instead sold him to an insurance agent for $200 in 1846. Six months later, Senator Daniel Webster intervened to buy him from the new owner and gave Jennings his freedom, for which he repaid the senator in work. Madison sold Montpelier, its remaining slaves, and the furnishings to pay off outstanding debts. Jennings later recalled in his memoir,


title: Dolley Madison

text: In the last days of her life, before Congress purchased her husband's papers, she was in a state of absolute poverty, and I think sometimes suffered for the necessaries of life. While I was a servant to Mr. Webster, he often sent me to her with a market-basket full of provisions, and told me whenever I saw anything in the house that I thought she was in need of, to take it to her. I often did this, and occasionally gave her small sums from my own pocket, though I had years before bought my freedom of her.


title: Dolley Madison

text: In 1848, Congress agreed to buy the rest of James Madison's papers for the sum of $22,000 or $25,000.


title: Dolley Madison

text: In 1845, Dolley Madison was baptized into St. John's Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C.


title: Dolley Madison

text: On February 28, 1844, Madison was with President John Tyler while aboard the USS "Princeton" when a "Peacemaker" cannon exploded in the process of being fired. While Secretaries of State and Navy Abel P. Upshur and Thomas Walker Gilmer, Tyler's future father-in-law David Gardiner and three others were killed, Tyler and Madison escaped unharmed.


title: Dolley Madison

text: She was photographed on at least two occasions, making her the earliest First Lady to have a surviving photograph, with four daguerreotypes known to survive as of 2021. Three photographs were taken on July 4, 1848, including one featuring her niece, Anna Payne; the final one was taken in 1849, featuring President James Polk, his wife Sarah Polk, future President James Buchanan and future First Lady Harriet Lane.


title: Dolley Madison

text: Dolley Madison died at her home in Washington in 1849, at the age of 81. She was first buried in the Congressional Cemetery, Washington, D.C., but later was re-interred at Montpelier next to her husband. She was buried in an air-tight Fisk metallic burial case with a glass window plate for viewing the face of the deceased.


title: Dolley Madison

text: In the past, biographers and others stated that her given name was Dorothea, after her aunt, or Dorothy, and that Dolley was a nickname. But her birth was registered with the New Garden Friends Meeting as Dolley, and her will of 1841 states "I, Dolly P. Madison". Based on manuscript evidence and the scholarship of recent biographers, Dollie, spelled "ie", appears to have been her given name at birth. On the other hand, the print press, especially newspapers, tended to spell it "Dolly": for example, the "Hallowell (Maine) Gazette", February 8, 1815, p. 4, refers to how the Congress had allowed "Madame Dolly Madison" an allowance of $14,000 to purchase new furniture; and the New Bedford (MA) of March 3, 1837, p. 2 referred to a number of important papers from her late husband, and said that "Mrs. Dolly Madison" would be paid by the Senate for these historical manuscripts. Several magazines of that time also used the "Dolly" spelling, such as "The Knickerbocker", February 1837, p. 165; as did many popular magazines of the 1860s–1890s. She was referred to as "Mistress Dolly" in an essay from "Munsey's Magazine" in 1896. Her grandniece Lucia Beverly Cutts, in her "Memoirs and letters of Dolly Madison: wife of James Madison, president of the United States" (1896) uses "Dolly" consistently throughout.


title: Dolley Madison

text: Since 1982 Siena College Research Institute has periodically conducted surveys asking historians to assess American first ladies according to a cumulative score on the independent criteria of their background, value to the country, intelligence, courage, accomplishments, integrity, leadership, being their own women, public image, and value to the president. Consistently, Madison has ranked among the six-most highly regarded first ladies in these surveys. In terms of cumulative assessment, Madison has been ranked:


title: Dolley Madison

text: In the 2008 Siena Research Institute survey, Madison was ranked in the top-four of all criteria, ranking the 4th-highest in value to the country and 5th-highest in public image. In the 2014 survey, Madison and her husband were ranked the 5th-highest out of 4th first couples in terms of being a "power couple".


title: Josef Bican

text: Josef "Pepi" Bican (25 September 1913 – 12 December 2001) was an Austrian-Czech professional footballer who played as a striker. He is the second-most prolific goalscorer in official matches in recorded history according to Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation (RSSSF), with over 950 goals scored in 624 matches.


title: Josef Bican

text: According to RSSSF, Bican scored over 1813 total goals in over 1089 total matches. In total Bican scored 1137 unofficial goals in more than 514 games for Slavia Praha, with a ratio of 1.79 goals per game across his almost 15-year career at the club in total.


title: Josef Bican

text: Bican began his professional career at Rapid Vienna in 1931. After four years at Rapid, he moved to local rivals Admira Vienna. Bican won four league titles during his time in Austria, moved to Slavia Praha in 1937, where he stayed until 1948, and became the club's all-time top goalscorer. He later played for FC Vitkovice, FC Hradec Králové, and Dynamo Praha, retiring in 1955 as the all-time top goalscorer in the Czechoslovak First League with 447 goals.


title: Josef Bican

text: Bican was a member of the Austrian "Wunderteam" of the 1930s and represented the nation at the 1934 FIFA World Cup, where they reached the semi-finals. He later switched allegiance to the Czechoslovakia national football team, but a clerical error related to his transfer of national team precluded him from playing in the 1938 FIFA World Cup. Bican was a tall and powerful player, with the technical ability to play with both feet, and had considerable pace. During his athletic prime, he was reportedly capable of running 100 metres in 10.8 seconds, which was not far off the leading sprinters of his time.


title: Josef Bican

text: After his retirement from playing, Bican became a manager, and coached various teams from the 1950s until the 1970s. In 1998, Bican was given a "Medal of Honour" by the International Federation of Football History & Statistics (IFFHS) for being among the world's most successful top division goalscorers of all time. In 2000, the IFFHS awarded Bican the "Golden Ball" in recognition of his status as the greatest goalscorer of the 20th century. The award was based on how many times a player had been top scorer in his domestic league, a feat which Bican achieved 12 times.


title: Josef Bican

text: Josef Bican was born in Favoriten, Vienna, Austria-Hungary, to parents František Bican and Ludmila Kopecka, at Quellenstrasse 101. He was the second of three children, František, Josef and Vilík. František was from Sedlice in Southern Bohemia, and Ludmila was Viennese Czech. Josef's father František was a footballer who played for . He fought in World War I and returned uninjured. However, František died at the early age of 30 in 1921 after refusing an operation to treat an infected kidney after an injury sustained during a football match. This was when František was just 10, Josef was 8 and Vilík was 3. officials gave František a nice funeral and told Ludmila that they would take care of her sons and would even give them an education. At first they visited the boys every day and would bring something to help out. However this soon changed as they would come every week, once a fortnight and within three months it was as if they had forgotten about the Bican family. Ludmila was stuck in a desperate situation, she sent Vilík to be looked after by his grandparents in Bohemia, until he was 14. Ludmila's life got harder as she had to work twice as hard as before, cleaning crayfish and washing dishes at a nearby restaurant. Most days she would have to get up at four in the morning to come home at ten, but sometimes even later.


title: Josef Bican

text: The family's poverty meant that Bican initially had to play football without shoes, which helped him improve his ball control skills. Bican attended the Jan Amos Komenský school, a Czech school in Vienna. For entertainment František and Josef would make a football out of old material and sometimes Ludmila would be left without one stocking. On some days they would arrive at school with dirty clothes and foreheads due to playing football before school. They would play matches between classes and between schools, they had no time to study. Josef would play football so much that she had to lock him indoors to try and get him to study. The players at his school would whistle and call to Josef to get him to come to a match that day. He lived one story up, but this didn't stop him. He climbed out the window and played the game. The school team was victorious as the score was 12–2, Josef had scored 8 goals.


title: Josef Bican

text: His older brother, František, was also a good footballer, as he started playing for Hertha Vienna, aged 11. František died tragically at 17. They had brought him home with a knife in his heart. They had told the Bican family that it was a very unfortunate accident that he had taken his own life. In situations like these Ludmila was normally brave, however this time she was scared and she sent Josef to live with Vilík and his grandparents.


title: Josef Bican

text: Working at Schustek parquet factory, Josef would work around the office and in the warehouse and earnt twenty shillings a week. In the spring of 1931 Farbenlutz attracted Bican to start working for them as he would earn 30 shillings a week.


title: Josef Bican

text: At the age of twelve, Bican was already playing in the youth set-up of and he was even coached by a former player that had played with his father. The Hertha Vienna pitch was only a few steps away from his house. Bican was the smallest of the boys there, however a Hertha Vienna official told him, “You’ll get a shilling every time you score.” He scored two in his very first match.


title: Josef Bican

text: As his career slowed down at Hertha Vienna, due to him not playing for almost half a year, one of his friends invited him to play for Schustek. It was a parquet factory, small but profitable. At the age of 15, in the autumn of 1928, Bican made his debut for Schustek. Josef scored three goals in a 5–2 friendly victory over Nord Vienna. In 1931 he would start playing for Farbenlutz and would not even train.


title: Josef Bican

text: Near to where Bican lived, Roman Schramseis also resided and after seeing Bican play on several occasions, Roman offered him the chance to train at Rapid Wien. “I already told Richard Kuthan about it.” Bican was invited to watch a training session with the amateur team, but as soon as he and his friend watched the others play they got scared and headed home. The next Tuesday, Bican was to play a training game between the junior team and the amateur team. He played for the junior team as they won 7–2 and scored five goals. On the Sunday of the same week he was again invited to play for the adult team. Rapid Wien beat their opponents 4-2 and Bican scored two.


title: Josef Bican

text: In 1931, when Bican first joined Rapid, he received 150 schillings, but, by the age of 20, Rapid wanted to keep him so much that they paid him 600 schillings. In his debut game against Austria Wien, club where Matthias Sindelar played, Bican scored four goals in a victory 5–3.


title: Josef Bican

text: Bican recalls the game as this: "Sometime in the tenth minute, I received the ball from the right, in a large amount of space, went around Gall and with my left foot, I scored the first goal, into the corner. Weselik broke through and struck a shot that hit the cross bar, on the rebound I hooked the ball into to the net, again, with my left foot. Before halftime, I scored my third goal, a nice, clean instep at full speed. My teammates rushed towards me and carried me to the center of the field. For my fourth, I luckily got past Mock and only Gall was in front of me, he took me to the ground, but I was still able to shoot and score the decisive fifth goal. When the match was over, everyone was kissing me. But in the dressing room they had to cut open my sleeve, to get my shirt off me. I had finished the game with a swollen wrist. I didn't even notice it. The joy was greater than the pain".


title: Josef Bican

text: Bican won the Austrian title with Rapid in 1934–35 and his first goalscoring title, but by the end of the season, he had been suspended after refusing to sign a new contract and Bican decided to go on strike. Intotal for Rapid Vienna Josef played 156 games an scored 201 goals. Through one of his uncles, a deal was done with Admira Wien, at the time the most successful side in Austrian history. Rapid however refused to release his registration, and Bican went nine months without playing a game. When he was allowed to leave, Bican won championships in both his seasons with the Vienna club, but his heart was set on his family's homeland.


title: Josef Bican

text: Bican was the top scorer in his first season, but Slavia finished as runner-up. The following season, in March 1939, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and football split on similar lines, with Bohemian and Moravian clubs carrying their results from the Czechoslovak league into the new Bohemian-Moravian league. Bican was again the top scorer of the league but Sparta Prague, Slavia's greatest rival, won the championship again.


title: Josef Bican

text: The third year (1941) the first of Bican's four championships came with the third of the continuous 10 goalscoring titles. He played for Slavia throughout World War II, while many of his football rivals were at war. During eight league seasons he scored 328 goals, including 57 in 26 matches one particular season (1943–44). Three times in his career, Bican scored seven goals in a game. In a 1939–40 league match against Zlín, Bican found the net seven times as Slavia ran out 10–1 winners. During the 1939–40 season, he set a world record for the longest goal-scoring streak in a European top division when he scored at least one goal for 19 games in a row, netting a total of 47 goals over his run that included hat-tricks in 5 back-to-back league games. His record stood for 73 years until it was broken in 2013 by Lionel Messi (21 games in the Spanish league). During the 1940–41 season, Bican matched his feat of the previous season, again against Zlín, scoring seven times, as Slavia won by a 12–1 scoreline. It was 1947–48 before Bican managed his third seven-goal match, as Slavia defeated České Budějovice in a game which finished 15–1.


title: Josef Bican

text: He was in the leagues that he played, the top-scorer 12 times during his 25-year professional career and Europe's and the world's top scorer in five consecutive seasons, from 1939–40 to 1943–44, a record that still stands.


title: Josef Bican

text: After the war several of Europe's big clubs were interested in signing Bican. Italian side Juventus were very keen and offered Bican handsome terms. He was advised that there was a big chance the Communists could take over in Italy, but what actually happened was the opposite. When the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Bican refused to join the Communist Party, just as before the war he had refused to join the Nazi Party in Austria. Josef Bican's image had established him as one of the biggest names in the country's society. But his happy days were soon to be over. The communist government wanted to use Bican as a propaganda weapon. When he refused to be a puppet, the Czechoslovak authorities put it about that Bican was a bourgeois Viennese, ignoring his plea that his origins were humble.


title: Josef Bican

text: Bican tried to improve his standing with the Communists by joining steel works Železárny Vítkovice. During 1952, he joined FC Hradec Králové, where he managed to score 53 goals in 26 matches. On 1 May 1953, the Communist Party forced him to leave the city and, therefore, the club. After being forced to leave, he returned to Slavia Prague, or, as it was known then, Dynamo Prague. He continued to play for Dynamo until retiring from playing at the age of 42 in 1955. He was the oldest player in the league at that time.


title: Josef Bican

text: On 29 November 1933, aged 20 years and 64 days, Bican made his debut for Austria in a 2–2 draw against Scotland. He later played for them at the 1934 World Cup, when the Austrian "Wunderteam" reached the semifinals. His solitary goal in the tournament came in extra time of Austria's 3–2 win over France.


title: Josef Bican

text: At the time Bican was playing for Slavia Prague, he applied for Czechoslovak citizenship. However, when he eventually became a Czechoslovak citizen, he discovered that a clerical error meant he couldn't play at the 1938 World Cup. In total, he scored 29 goals in 34 international matches for three national teams (Austria, Czechoslovakia and Bohemia & Moravia). His final national team appearance was for Czechoslovakia in a 3–1 defeat against Bulgaria on 4 September 1949.


title: Josef Bican

text: However, his success did have a disadvantage. Other members of the team became jealous of the tall, handsome Bican's success, and he was sometimes called abusive names, such as "Austrian bastard".


title: Josef Bican

text: In addition to representing Austria, Czechoslovakia and the region of Bohemia & Moravia, Bican also played a number of fixtures playing for teams consisting of the best players from a league or town between 1939 and 1949. For the Bohemia-Moravia league team in 1939 he played six games scoring nine goals, for the Bohemia league team in 1940–1944 he played eight games scoring 11 goals, for Prague from 1938 to 1948 he played six games scoring one goal and Ostrava in 1949 he played one game scoring one goal, bringing Bican's total number of official goals outside of club football to 48 goals in 54 games.


title: Josef Bican

text: Grandfather František and Grandmother Terezie were one of the poorest families of the town. Grandfather František’s second son Josef, died during the war and for financial support they took 50 koruna per month. The start of young Josef’s love for fishing came when Grandfather František took him and Vilík to a nearby river and the boys would fish either side of František.


title: Josef Bican

text: During the spring of 1968, Bican was told that he would be allowed to have a coaching job abroad. He impressed the Belgian team Tongeren and they hired him as a coach, where he had some success taking them from Division 4 to Division 2.


title: Josef Bican

text: Around this time, Pelé was getting ready for his 1000th goal and many journalists were searching for another player who had scored a thousand goals. Former Austrian player Franz "Bimbo" Binder suggested Bican, who he claimed to have scored over 5000 goals in all competitions. When reporters asked Bican why he had not sought more attention for his goalscoring feats, he simply said, "who'd have believed me if I said I'd scored five times as many goals as Pelé?" However, to score over 5000 goals he should have kept an average of 185 goals/year along all his 27 years of career, but only counting goals in official matches, Bican scored at least 950 goals. Bican's goal-scoring feats are often forgotten because he did not make a big fuss about it in the media. His record is often overshadowed by Pelé's 1303 goal record, including goals in unofficial matches. But shortly before his death in 2001, IFFHS based on RSSSF statistics declared Bican with 643 league goals, the most prolific scorer of the 20th century. This was judged by the number of times a player had been top scorer in his domestic league. Bican managed this feat 12 times, more than any other player in football history.


title: Josef Bican

text: In the 1990s, Bican spoke to Czech TV about the difficulty of scoring during his era: "When I talk to young reporters, they always say, 'Mr Bican, scoring was easier back in your day.' But I ask them, 'How come? Look, are there opportunities today?' And they tell me, 'Of course there are, many of them'. And I say, 'There you go. If there weren't opportunities, it would be difficult. But if there are, scoring is the same as it was a hundred years ago, and will be the same in a hundred years' time, too. It will always be the same."


title: Josef Bican

text: "Bican was incredibly unlucky at the height of his career. There was no World Cup in 1942 or 1946 because of the war. If the 1942 edition had taken place, for example, he would surely have become more widely known. Perhaps he might even have been as famous as Pele", Radovan Jelinek, sports historian said about him.


title: Josef Bican

text: Bican spent the last few months of his life in hospital with heart problems. He had hoped to be home for Christmas, but died less than two weeks before that, at the age of 88. In September 2013, which would have been Bican's 100th birthday, Slavia Prague commemorated him by wearing shirts that featured a replica of his signature on them.


title: Viet Minh

text: The Việt Minh (; abbreviated from , chữ Nôm and Hán tự: ; , ) was a national independence coalition formed at Pác Bó by Hồ Chí Minh on 19 May 1941. Also known as the Việt Minh Front, it was created by the Indochinese Communist Party as a national united front to achieve the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.


title: Viet Minh

text: The was previously formed by Hồ Học Lãm in Nanjing, China, at some point between August 1935 and early 1936, when Vietnamese nationalist parties formed an anti-imperialist united front. This organization soon lapsed into inactivity, only to be appropriated by the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) and Hồ Chí Minh in 1941. The Việt Minh established itself as the only organized anti-French and anti-Japanese resistance group. The Việt Minh initially formed to seek independence for Vietnam from the French Empire. The United States supported France. When the Japanese occupation began, the Việt Minh opposed Japan with support from the United States and the Republic of China. After World War II, the Việt Minh opposed the re-occupation of Vietnam by France, resulting in the Indochina War, and later opposed South Vietnam and the United States in the Vietnam War.


title: Viet Minh

text: The political leader and founder of Việt Minh was Hồ Chí Minh. The military leadership was under the command of Võ Nguyên Giáp. Other founders were Lê Duẩn and Phạm Văn Đồng.


title: Viet Minh

text: The "Việt Nam Độc lập Đồng minh" is not to be confused with the "Việt Nam Cách mệnh Đồng minh Hội" (League for the Vietnamese Revolution, abbreviated as "Việt Cách") which was founded by Nguyễn Hải Thần. Việt Cách later joined the Vietnamese National Coalition in 1946.


title: Viet Minh

text: During World War II, Japan occupied French Indochina. As well as fighting the French in the battles of Khai Phat and Na Ngan, the Việt Minh started a campaign against the Japanese. As of the end of 1944, the Việt Minh claimed a membership of 500,000, of which 200,000 were in Tonkin, 150,000 in Annam, and 150,000 in Cochinchina. After the Japanese coup d'état in French Indochina, the Viet Minh and ICP prolifically expanded their activities. They formed national salvation associations (cuu quoc hoi) that, in Quang Ngai province alone, enlisted 100,000 peasants by mid-1945. This was backed by the Vanguard Youth (Thanh Nien Tien Phong)in Cochinchina, which expanded to 200,000 by early summer. In the northern provinces of Việt Bắc, their armed forces seized control, after which they distributed lands to the poor, abolished the corvee, established quoc ngu classes, local village militias, and declared universal suffrage and democratic freedoms.


title: Viet Minh

text: Due to their opposition to the Japanese, the Việt Minh received funding from the United States, the Soviet Union and the Republic of China. After the August Revolution’s takeover of nationalist organizations and Emperor Bảo Đại's abdication to the Việt Minh, Hồ Chí Minh declared Vietnam's independence by proclaiming the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September 1945.


title: Viet Minh

text: Within days, the Chinese Kuomintang (Nationalist) Army arrived in Vietnam to supervise the repatriation of the Imperial Japanese Army. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam therefore existed only in theory and effectively controlled no territory. A few months later, the Chinese, Vietnamese and French came to a three-way understanding. The French gave up certain rights in China, the Việt Minh agreed to the return of the French in exchange for promises of independence within the French Union, and the Chinese agreed to leave. Negotiations between the French and Việt Minh broke down quickly. What followed was nearly ten years of war against France. This was known as the First Indochina War or, to the Vietnamese; "the French War".


title: Viet Minh

text: The Việt Minh, who were short on modern military knowledge, created a military school in Quảng Ngãi Province in June 1946. More than 400 Vietnamese were trained by Japanese defectors in this school. These soldiers were considered to be students of the Japanese. Later, some of them fought as generals against the United States in the Vietnam War or, to the Vietnamese; "the American War".


title: Viet Minh

text: French General Jean Étienne Valluy quickly pushed the Việt Minh out of Hanoi. His French infantry with armored units went through Hanoi, fighting small battles against isolated Việt Minh groups. The French encircled the Việt Minh base, Việt Bắc, in 1947, but failed to defeat the Việt Minh forces, and had to retreat soon after. The campaign is now widely considered a Việt Minh victory over the well-equipped French force.


title: Viet Minh

text: The Việt Minh continued fighting against the French until 1949, when the border of China and Vietnam was linked together as a result of the campaign called "Chiến dịch Biên giới" ("Borderland Campaign"). The newly communist People's Republic of China gave the Việt Minh both sheltered bases and heavy weapons with which to fight the French. With the additional weapons, the Việt Minh were able to take control over many rural areas of the country. Soon after that, they began to advance towards the French-occupied areas.


title: Viet Minh

text: Following their defeat at the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ, the French began negotiations to leave Vietnam. As a result of peace accords worked out at the Geneva Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, Vietnam was divided into North Vietnam and South Vietnam at the 17th Parallel as a temporary measure until unifying elections could take place in 1956. Transfer of civil administration of North Vietnam to the Việt Minh was given on 11 October 1954. Hồ Chí Minh was appointed Prime Minister of North Vietnam, which would be run as a socialist state. Ngô Đình Diệm, who was previously appointed Prime Minister of South Vietnam by Emperor Bảo Đại, eventually assumed control of South Vietnam.


title: Viet Minh

text: The Geneva Accords promised elections in 1956 to determine a national government for a united Vietnam. Neither the United States government nor Ngô Đình Diệm's State of Vietnam signed anything at the 1954 Geneva Conference. With respect to the question of reunification, the non-communist Vietnamese delegation objected strenuously to any division of Vietnam, but lost out when the French accepted the proposal of Việt Minh delegate Phạm Văn Đồng, who proposed that Vietnam eventually be united by elections under the supervision of "local commissions". The United States countered with what became known as the "American Plan", with the support of South Vietnam and the United Kingdom. It provided for unification elections under the supervision of the United Nations, but was rejected by the Soviet delegation. From his home in France, Vietnamese Emperor Bảo Đại appointed Ngô Đình Diệm as Prime Minister of South Vietnam. With United States support in rigging the referendum of 1955 using secret Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funding, Diệm removed the Emperor and declared himself the president of the Republic of Vietnam.