The Islamic caliphate and other Islamic states took over the Middle East starting in the 7th century, and later expanded into India and Indonesia. The Crusades would be fought from the 12th century, in Christian Europe's attempt to retake the Holy Land from the Muslims. The Mongol Empire conquered a large part of Asia in the 13th century, an area extending from China to Europe. The Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire conquered most of the Indian subcontinent.
The Russian Empire began to expand into Asia from the 17th century, eventually taking control of all of Siberia and most of Central Asia by the end of the 19th century. The Ottoman Empire controlled Turkey and the Middle East from the 16th century onwards. In the 17th century, the Manchu conquered China and established the Qing Dynasty, although this was in decline by the nineteenth century and had been overthrown in 1912.
Several European powers had control of other parts of Asia by the 1900s, such as British India, French Indochina and Portuguese Macau and Goa. Russia and Britain struggled for power in the Central Asian region in the nineteenth century. The Trans-Siberian Railway that crossed Asia by train was complete by 1916. Parts of Asia remained free from European control, although not influence, such as Persia, Thailand and most of China. In the twentieth century, Imperial Japan expanded into China, Korea and Southeast Asia during the Second World War. After the war, many Asian countries became independent from European powers. During the Cold War, the northern parts of Asia were communist controlled with the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China, while western allies formed pacts such as CENTO and SEATO. Conflicts such as the Korean War, Vietnam War and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were fought between communists and anti-communists. In the decades after the Second World War, a massive restructuring plan drove Japan to become the world's second-largest economy, a phenomenon known as the Japanese post-war economic miracle. The Arab-Israeli conflict has dominated much of the recent history of the Middle East. After the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, there were many new independent nations in Central Asia.
listed by area in alphabetical order
Periphery
Generally, a periphery is a boundary or outer part of any space or body. It is derived from the Greek word , meaning a circumference or outer surface.
International Mathematical Olympiad
The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is a six-question two-day math competition for students that have not yet gone to college and are under 20 years old. Any country may take part in it by sending a team of six students to compete.
The IMO has been held every year since 1959. It takes place in a different country (which is called the "host country") from year to year.
Edmund Phelps
Edmund Strother "Ned" Phelps, Jr. is an American economist. He was born on July 26, 1933 in Evanston, Illinois. He was given the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He is best known for his work on economic growth at Yale University's Cowles Foundation in the 1960s. This includes the idea of the Golden Rule savings rate, which is about how much money should be spent and how much should be saved for the future. Some of his best work is on microeconomics of full employment and how prices affect wages. Part of this work is about the natural rate of unemployment.
Phelps has been the McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University since 1982. He is also the director of Columbia's Center on Capitalism and Society.
His Nobel Prize award was announced on October 9, 2006. He received the award on his own, breaking the recent pattern of awarding the prize to two or more winners at the same time.
Edmund Phelps was born in 1933 near Chicago, but he grew up and went to school in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where his family had moved when he was six years old. In 1951, he went to Amherst College as an undergraduate student. At his fathers advice, Phelps took his first economics course in his second year at Amherst. His economics teacher was James Nelson and his studies were based on a famous textbook by Paul Samuelson. Phelps was very interested in studying business. He knew of important unsolved problems and had new ideas, such as the gap between microeconomics and macroeconomics.
After receiving his B.A. at Amherst in 1955, Phelps went to Yale University for graduate studies. There, his professors were some of the greatest economists, such as Nobel prize winners James Tobin and Thomas Schelling, and he studied with Arthur Okun. William Fellner and Henry Wallich were very important in his study courses. Phelps received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1959. The work for his Ph.D. was based on an idea by Tobin, that peoples need in an emergency has more effect than sudden price changes.
After receiving his Ph.D., Phelps went to work as an economist for the RAND Corporation. His main interest was macroeconomics, but RAND focused on defense work so Phelps decided to return to the his studies the next year, 1960. He took a research job at the Cowles Foundation, and a teaching job at Yale. At the Cowles Foundation, his research was mainly on future prices and wages, following the work of Robert Solow. As part of this research, Phelps published in 1961 a famous paper on the golden rule savings rate, one of his most important works for economic science. He also wrote papers about other economic theories, such as monetary economics (Ricardian equivalence) and its importance when producing the best economic growth.
Work at the Cowles Foundation gave Phelps the chance to meet with other important economists who were working on growth theory, such as David Cass and Nobel Prize winner Tjalling Koopmans. Also, during the academic year of 1962-63 Phelps visited MIT, where he met with Nobel prize winners Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow and Franco Modigliani.
In 1966, Phelps left Yale and moved to University of Pennsylvania, where he was offered a permanent job as professor of economics. While at Pennsylvania, most of Phelps' research was on the links between employment, wages and inflation. He wrote about this in 1968: "Money-Wage Dynamics and Labor Market Equilibrium". This research had important new ideas about the Phillips curve. It was the first idea of the natural rate of unemployment and said that inflation rates did not affect labour market. In January 1969, Phelps held a meeting at Pennsylvania University to support the research on inflation and employment. The story of the meeting was published the next year in a book which was very important and is known as the "Phelps volume". During this time Phelps worked with other economists on research of economic growth, the effects of monetary and policy and best population growth.
In the year 1969-1970 Professor Phelps worked for the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science at Stanford University. Meeting with Nobel prize winners Amartya Sen and Kenneth Arrow, and reading the work of John Rawls, whom he met during that year, gave Professor Phelps an interest to research outside of macroeconomics. In 1972 he published research he named "statistical discrimination". He also published research on economic justice, using ideas from Rawls book "A Theory of Justice".
In 1971, Phelps moved to the Economics Department at Columbia University, where Nobel prize winners William Vickrey and James J. Heckman were studying. Nobel Prize winner Robert Mundell joined three years later, as well as Phoebus Dhrymes, Guillermo Calvo and John B. Taylor. Professor Phelps published research on the inflation tax and the effects of fiscal policy on inflation. In 1972, Phelps published a book about his new theory. The book had many ideas about the effects of being unemployed for a long time and made him more popular.