bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The mathematical wallpaper
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Sophie (or Sofya) Kovalevsky was a mathematician of genius. Her name crops up in today’s textbooks in the Cauchy-Kovalevsky theorem of differential equations, and she also made notable contributions to mechanics and to physics, especially to the theory of light propagation through crystalline solids. Her life is the stuff of romantic fiction.
Sophie Kovalevsky was born in 1850 into the Russian nobility, the daughter of General of Artillery Korvin-Krukovsky. It was an uncle who first sparked her interest in mathematics:
more than anything else he loved to communicate the things he had succeeded in reading and learning in the course of his long life.
Hoax!
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The Piltdown skull is probably the most famous and successful hoax in the history of science. It broke upon the turbulent and divided sodality of anthropologists on eighteenth December 1912 at a meeting in London of the Geological Society. The affair had been incubating for nearly four years, ever since a prominent amateur archaeologist, Charles Dawson, had come by some fragments of a human skull. They had been unearthed by workmen in a gravel pit at Piltdown in Sussex. Dawson, who had always hoped that the Sussex Downs would yield up prehistoric human remains, eagerly sifted through the spoil at the pit and found more fragments of ancient, deeply stained bone, together with worked flints and animal remains. Excited, he alerted his friend, Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Palaeontology at the Natural History Museum (then still an arm of the British Museum) in London, and a young Frenchman, whom he had befriended while digging in Sussex. This was none other than Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was to become a cult figure 50 years on, through his mystical conceptions of the noosphere and the omega point, elaborated in his book The Phenomenon of Man, which sought to reconcile biblical teaching with evolution.
Shocking experiment
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was born into the Prussian nobility, a milieu in which a military career was all but foreordained. But the young Alexander developed an unaccountable and to his family wholly aberrant interest in science. Persisting in the face of stern disapproval, he entered the Mining Academy in Freiburg and returned to Prussia as an Inspector of Mines. He developed modified versions of Humphry Davy’s famous safety lamp and invented a breathing apparatus for miners. At the same time he was summoned to undertake diplomatic missions in an unsettled Europe. He somehow found time to establish his own Free Royal Mining School, where miners were taught about such subjects as geology. But Humboldt had set his heart all along on a life of science and exploration. He became possessed by a consuming fascination with geology, the Earth’s magnetic field and, above all, ‘animal magnetism’, for Galvani’s work on twitching frog muscles [58] had recently appeared. Humboldt developed a theory of his own: the metal electrodes, he decided, were not the cause of the twitches, they merely intensified an innate property of the muscle. He began a series of experiments on animal muscles and plants and then proceeded to test his ideas on himself.
Calton surpassed
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The erratic genius Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, conjectured that no two humans had the same fingerprint, and that fingerprints could be rigorously measured and compared. Fingerprints had in fact been used in the mid-nineteenth century by a scientifically informed administrator in British India for ‘preventing personation and putting an end to disputes about the authenticity of deeds’. (They were introduced by a local governor, Sir William Herschel, grandson and great-grandson of eminent astronomers [156].) By 1905, Nature could report that the fingerprint department of Scotland Yard was in possession of 80,000-90,000 specimens. The fingerprint remained for another 80 years the principal instrument of forensic detection, until, in 1984, a discovery at the University of Leicester supplanted it.
Domestic horror show
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Claude Bernard (1813-78), the foremost physiologist of the nineteenth century, had a troubled domestic life. His wife was a strict Catholic, had no sympathy with, or understanding of science, and, worse, strongly disapproved of her husband’s experiments on animals. She contributed money to an anti-vivisection movement and turned her three children against their father. There was some excuse for her distaste, especially because Bernard, a compulsive and passionate experimenter, would often bring work home with him. Here is a description of one such occasion by Bernard’s biographer. It was at an early stage in their married life; they already had a two-year old child and Madame Bernard was again pregnant.
Her husband brought to their small flat [in Paris] on an upper floor on Sunday morning a dog with an open wound in its side from which internal fluids were drawn off from time to time; the dog was in a state of extreme emaciation, yet with a voracious appetite, pus running from its nostrils, coughing as it was led up and down the stairs, suffering from diarrhoea, its faeces being of particular interest to the master of the house.
The physicist as travelling salesman
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
With the advent of atom-smashing machines, colliders designed to accelerate particles to speeds approaching that of light and smash into each other, the practice of physics began to change. The cost of such experiments assumed significance on the scale of national budgets, and it was only men of boundless, even fanatical, self-confidence who could initiate the projects and direct the teams of hundreds needed to bring them to fruition. The leader became an advertising executive and salesman, much of whose work would be done on the road, travelling business class. With such astronomical stakes, intrigues against the competing laboratory became almost as great a preoccupation as the success of the experiment. ‘This generation of high-energy physicists’, in the view of Marty Perl, one of the leaders in the field of fundamental particles, ‘could also have done very well in the retail garment trade.’ One of the most predatory of this fearsome breed is an Italian, Carlo Rubbia, of Chicago and CERN, the pan-European laboratory in Geneva. Here is a tale that encapsulates the high intensity at which such laboratories operate.
The shock of recognition
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Frederick Soddy, born in Eastbourne in 1877, was a chemist, recruited by Ernest Rutherford [16], then occupying his first professorial chair at McGill University in Canada, to assist in the analysis of radioactive elements. Together, in 1901, they made a staggering discovery: the radioactive metal, thorium, gave rise spontaneously to a radioactive gas, a different and new element. Soddy managed to prepare enough of this gas to liquefy it and show that it resembled the inert gas, argon. This ‘thorium emanation’ was later named radon.
Dr Pincus’s pill
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The birth-control pill is associated with the names of Gregory Pincus, John Rock, and Carl Djerassi—the physiologist, the doctor, and the organic chemist— and quite a number of others, for many man-years of patient research went into its development. Much of the initial impetus came from Margaret Sanger, who had sought to liberate women from the tyranny of unwanted pregnancies, and the philanthropist Katherine McCormick. The first success came in 1955, when Rock, a professor at Harvard Medical Scool and an expert on fertility, began cautiously testing the effect of the hormone analogue, progestin, on a plucky ‘cagefull’ of ovulating women, willing guinea-pigs all.
The frivolous philosophe
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The following story of Denis Diderot’s embarrassing encounter with Leonhard Euler (1707-83), the celebrated Swiss mathematician, was attributed to Augustus De Morgan (1806-71), English mathematician and writer. It is repeated in many popular works of mathematics, and goes like this: the renowned encyclopédist e was visiting the Russian Imperial court, expounding his doctrine of atheism. His dissertations aroused much interest, mingled with outrage. One day he was informed that Euler, who had also been received at the Empress Elisabeth’s court, was in possession of an algebraical proof of the existence of God. He would demonstrate it to Diderot before the court if Diderot were willing to attend. The philosophe readily consented. Euler was summoned, advanced towards Diderot, and in a tone of solemn conviction addressed him thus: ‘Monsieur, a + b/n = x, done Dieu existe: répondez!’ Diderot, who was innocent of all mathematical knowledge, was struck dumb. Mortified, and a prey to general mirth, he begged leave to withdraw and departed immediately for France.
The disagreeable man
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
One of the villains of twentieth-century science lived and thrived in Germany, though born in 1877 in Switzerland. His name was Emil Abderhalden and he was a student of Emil Fischer, the great organic chemist. Fischer was at the time preoccupied with the structure of proteins and had developed methods of synthesizing peptides—amino acids strung together in a chain of the kind found in natural proteins; but whereas proteins consist of chains of hundreds, even thousands of amino acids (though of only 20 kinds) in defined order, the chemistry of the day could assemble only a very few. When Abderhalden achieved independence as a professor in a veterinary school in Halle, he continued in the same line of work and his assistants synthesized peptides in vast numbers. To do something useful with these materials Abderhalden turned to the study of proteolytic enzymes, the digestive enzymes that break down proteins into small fragments.
The purple cloud
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
With the destruction of the French fleet during Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, the British naval blockade in the Mediterranean took effect. An early consequence was that the supplies of potassium nitrate, saltpetre, the main ingredient of gunpowder, which had been mainly imported through the southern French ports, began to dry up. The material was derived from the contents of the cesspits of North Africa by bacterial fermentation. (For the massive demands of the First World War, Germany initially imported its saltpetre from the mines of Chile, and the supply again was interrupted by a naval blockade; this time it was left to Fritz Haber [96], the celebrated chemist, to solve the problem by devising a chemical, rather than biological, ‘nitrogen fixation’ process.) The French sought to ferment their own cesspits and the products of the farms, slaughterhouses, and beaches, and chemists were employed to improve the saltpetre yields from these sources. One of them was Bernard Courtois (1777-1838), but he took a different route and sought instead to collect potassium compounds from seaweed.
The body’s bounty
Authors: Gratzer Walter 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Beliefs about the curative virtues of human bodily products were once common, but the value of oil secreted from a philosopher’s head probably has no precedent. The philosopher in question was Jeremy Bentham, who founded University College London, as a free-thinking institution: its members were liberated from the tyranny of the Anglican Church under which the ancient universities of England were labouring. When Bentham died in 1832, his body was anatomized, as he had laid down in his will, and his mummified remains repose still in a mahogany case in the college foyer, to be exposed to view on ceremonial occasions. Thomas Love Peacock, the novelist, had been a friend of Bentham’s, of whom ‘he talked at much length’.
From Domesday Book To Magna Carta 1087–1216
Authors: Poole Austin Lane , Litt D 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
This illuminating book provides an account of a century and a half of English medieval history, beginning with the compilation of the Domesday Book and culminating in the issue of the Magna Carta and the subsequent civil war. A. L. Poole assesses the social and economic background to the period, the position of the monarchy, progress in education, church reform, and also studies the twelfth-century renaissance in literature and art, providing a full and detailed study of everyday life in English towns and country in medieval England. 'a model of its kind ... has the unusual merit of being at once comprehensive and uniformly satisfying' TES 'an important and useful book, written and well written by a scholar of great learning and integrity' Guardian 'a volume that all medievalists will admire and use will remain, alike for historians and for the general reader, an indispensable and adequate possession.
The Heritage of Medieval Judaism
Authors: Gartner Lloyd P 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Beneath the surface of events the multiplication of Jewish population is a cardinal fact in modern Jewish history. No more than one and a quarter million Jews lived in the world when Europe’s ascent to global supremacy began about 1650. The number of Jews was far fewer than at the beginning of the Christian era, when there were approximately 8 million in the world-embracing Roman and Persian empires. 1650 was the low point after which the world’s Jewish population climbed to approximately 16.7 million in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
A Rift Opening, 1720–1780
Authors: Gartner Lloyd P 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Between 1720 and 1780 the surface of traditional Jewish life changed little, as most ‘sacred communities’ (kehillot kedoshot) appeared solid and continued to be governed autonomously by their holy law (ha- lakhah). Cracks began to appear in the structure of community and religious life, but they did not appear about to topple. Neither did the social and economic life of the Jews undergo any basic change except among a small wealthy minority.
Outposts
Authors: Gartner Lloyd P 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Up to this point in chronology—about the 1870s—our study has been dominated by European Jewry. This should not be surprising. Well before the 1870s Europe, mainly western Europe, exercised world-wide economic and political domination. Also during this period the number of European Ashkenazim, who constituted about half the Jewish people about 1650, multiplied especially in eastern Europe.
A New Jewish World, 1950–1980
Authors: Gartner Lloyd P 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Seventy years of demographic transformation, Holocaust disaster, building a homeland, and founding a state, ended in 1950. A new era in the Jewish world opened. The era that had ended was one of passionate ideologies, primarily nationalist and socialist. By 1950 they lost their fire, and the new era ran its course without fervent new ideologies. Jews had achieved political, scientific, and cultural prominence in many countries during the years after 1880, but in countries not shattered by the Holocaust their cultural, political, and economic distinction after 1950 became extraordinary.
The path between truculence and servility: Prose literature from Augustus to Hadrian
Authors: Kraus Christina s. 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The Augustan period is variously dated from 44 BCE-the year of Julius Caesar’s assassination and the appearance on the scene of his heir, the 19-year-old Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (Octavian), later Augustus-or from 31 BCE, the year in which Octavian defeated Mark Antony and the Egyptian Queen Kleopatra at the Battle of Actium, and after which his rule received no serious challenge (see pp. 75-6). A third possible date is 27 BCE, when Octavian ‘restored the Repub lic’ and took the title ‘Augustus’, with its connotations of augury and authority. The flexible starting-point appropriately indicates the uncertain, shifting per ceptions of the times. It was not clear then, or indeed later, what role Augustus would play: he called himself princeps, ‘first man’, an ad hoc title with repub lican precedent (as in the ‘first man of the Senate’, the senator with dominant authority) which would, ultimately, become a proper imperial title: ‘Prince’. His dominance in Rome lasted until 14 CE, when he died at the age of 76; in that half-century he gradually encroached on many of the powers of the Sen ate, and devised some new powers of his own. Through a process today often characterized as ‘trial and error’, or experimentation, Augustus invented a kind of sole rule that was, by and large, acceptable to the majority of Roman citizens, despite their traditional hatred of kings.
Imperial space and time: The literature of leisure
Authors: Connors Catherine 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Alongside the more formal modes of literary production-epic, tragedy, his tory, philosophy, and oratory-Roman imperial audiences also enjoyed less formal literary modes. Examples produced during the post-Augustan period include satire, epigram, mixed collections, the versified fables in the style of Aesop composed by the freedman Phaedrus, and Petronius’ satirical and inventive novel, the Satyricon. These works are generally presented as ones to enjoy in leisure time, otium, and their informal qualities can include smallness of scale, a low or everyday subject-matter and style (as opposed to lofty national or mythological themes), or signs of spontaneous (as opposed to laborious) composition.
Culture wars: Latin literature from the second century to the end of the classical era
Authors: Dewar Michael 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Sex sells, as any publisher knows. That much was true in the second century too, though it seems a little magic and a lot of learning could be usefully added to the mix. The proof of this contention may be found in The Golden Ass, the celebrated novel of (?Lucius) Apuleius (c.125-70 CE) who came from Madaura in the province of Africa. Known formally as The Metamorphoses, this is the only Latin novel to survive complete from antiquity, and a remarkable piece of work it is (cf. pp. 218-20). Our hero, a young man by the name of Lucius, is travelling in Thessaly, in northern Greece, a part of the world famous for its witches. Lucius’ character is distinguished by a rampant curiosity about, on the one hand, the illicit knowledge of magic and, on the other, a young maid servant who is privy to many of the secrets of her mistress, a sorceress with a nice line in corporeal transformation. The maidservant’s skills are corporeal too, but not quite in the same way. Eager to experiment, Lucius attempts to reproduce the witch’s spells, but instead of becoming, as he hoped, a bird, he is transformed into a shaggy old ass. Luckily, there is an antidote: all he has to do is munch on a few rose petals, and all will be as good as new. But of course, if he were to do that straight off, there would be no novel, so poor Lucius in his grotesque inhuman form is subjected to a series of misadventures that take him from one end of Greece to the other, and see him repeatedly stolen, sold, beaten, humiliated, owned by all kinds of unpleasant characters, and threat ened by all kinds of even more unpleasant deaths, before eventually being scheduled for a performance in the arena at Corinth. His role is intended to be a central one, fitting to his, as it were, assets: he is to copulate with a woman condemned to death, and thus provide the instrument of her execution.
Sophisticates and solecisms: Greek literature after the classical period
Authors: Lightfoot Jane L 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Hellenistic, post-classical—the old world’s spiral into decline? The mainland Greek states continued their old squabbles for supremacy after the Peloponnesian War; but a new power was rising, and within a couple of generations it produced a figure who, in thirty-two years of life, would change the whole political geography of the world for good. The power was Macedon, and the figure was Alexander, soon known as the Great. He swept across Greece, Asia Minor, and Persia, obliterating the last Persian king; and, that done, stampeded over the central Asian steppe, only to be brought up short in the Punjab by a mutiny.
Disney,1933-1936
Authors: Barrier Michael 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In the months just after he made Three Little Pigs, Walt Disney took up the challenge of human characters again and made five Silly Symphonies with them. The third of those cartoons, The Pied Piper, was being animated when Three Little Pigs was released in May; it was easily the most ambitious of the new cartoons because its central figures, the Piper and Hamelin ‘s Mayor, most resembled real human beings in how they were drawn. In 1933 the production schedule, and the need to give work to animators, made the thoughtful casting behind Three Little Pigs impractical on every film; on Lullaby Land, the Silly Symphony that came just before The Pied Piper, the animators handled sequences rather than characters, and the infant protagonist looks like a different character from one animator ‘s scenes to the next. For The Pied Piper, though, Disney cast by character again, even more rigorously than he had for Three Little Pigs. All the most important scenes with the Mayor the closeup scenes in which he speaks-were assigned to Art Babbitt, and the comparable scenes with the Piper to Ham Luske.
Disney,1936-1938
Authors: Barrier Michael 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In the earliest sweatbox sessions for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in the late winter and early spring of 1936, Walt Disney reviewed a lot of animation of animals-the ones that help Snow White clean the dwarfs ‘ cottage-as well as some animation by Ham Luske of Snow White herself. By late spring, though, the greatest responsibility for animating Snow White had passed into the hands of Grim Natwick. He had joined the Disney staff on 12 November 1934, an event significant enough to be noted in Walt Disney ‘s desk diary, as few such staff developments were. “Down underneath it all/ Natwick said in 1976, “I think because of Betty Boop-that Walt had an idea all the time that maybe I would be able to draw Snow White.” That was surely true. Not only did Disney hire Natwick away from the Iwerks studio just as serious work on Snow White was getting under way, but when Natwick got his first assignment, on 30 November 1934, it was for the Silly Symphony Cookie Carnival. Ben Sharpsteen, the director, gave to Natwick a long scene (lasting almost a minute on the screen) in which a cookie boy dresses a cookie girl in marzipan finery so that she will be chosen queen of the carnival.