Abel Janszoon Tasman (ca. 1603-1659) was a Dutch navigator who discovered Tasmania and New Zealand's South Island and charted the northwest Australian coastline. Abel Tasman was born at Lutjegast near Groningen. After his second marriage, ...

Addition is one of the four basic operations of arithmetic (the others being subtraction, multiplication, and division). In arithmetic, addition operates on the set of real numbers such that for any real numbers added together, another rea...

American First Lady Abigail Adams (1744-1818), an early proponent of humane treatment and equal education for women, is considered a remarkable woman for her times. Perhaps best known for her prolific letter writing, she is credited with h...

From the seventeenth century, through the Middle Ages, and until the late nineteenth century, it was generally accepted that some organisms originated directly from nonliving matter. Such "spontaneous generation" appeared to ...

A semiautonomous republic in northwestern Georgia, Abkhazia borders Russia to the north, along a ridge of peaks in the Caucasus Mountains; the northeastern coast of the Black Sea defines its southern boundary. With some river valleys and a...

Activity-based management (ABM) is an approach to management in which process managers are given the responsibility and authority to continuously improve the planning and control of operations by focusing on key operational activities. ABM...

In colonial North America, the nonviolent Society of Friends stood almost alone in condemning slavery, which has led to the common misperception that the American antislavery movement was ideologically committed to nonviolence. In fact, de...

The patriarch Abraham (c. 1996 BC-1821 BC) started with humble beginnings as a son of Ur. Abraham is now regarded as one of the most influential people in all of history. The world's three largest monotheistic religions--in fact possibly m...

c. 1065-c. 1136 He wrote a large text in Hebrew on practical geometry, which contains the earliest use of algebra in Europe including the solution to one form of quadratic equation. He included many practical elements in his writing, and w...

The Jewish author and journalist Abraham Cahan (1860-1951) was a prominent Socialist leader and union organizer among Jewish immigrants in the United States. Abraham Cahan was born in Podberezhie, near Vilna, Lithuania. His father was a st...

1750-1791 English inventor who built the world's first cast-iron bridge. Darby's bridge, which crossed the Severn River in Coalbrookdale in England, was a major improvement over the wooden or masonry bridges that preceded it....

GEIGER, ABRAHAM (1810–1874), rabbi, foremost exponent and idealogue of Reform Judaism in nineteenth-century Germany and outstanding scholar of Wissenschaft des Judentums (the modern scholarly study of Judaism). Geiger was born in Fr...

Abraham (1830-1919) and Mary Putnam (1834-1906) Jacobi, husband and wife, were foreign-born American physicians and humanitarians who greatly improved medical care in the United States. Abraham Jacobi was born into a poverty-stricken famil...

Sixteenth president of the United States and president during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was immortalized by his Emancipation Proclamation, his Gettysburg Address, and two outstanding inaugural addresses. Abraham Lincoln wa...

The Flemish map maker and map seller Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598) is known for his "Theatrum orbis terrarum," one of the first major atlases. He accelerated the movement away from Ptolemaic geographical conceptions. Abraham Ortelius was bo...

1651-1742 English astronomer and mathematician who in 1705 calculated the value of π to an unprecedented 72 decimal places. Sharp was the first to use the new tools of calculus, recently introduced by Isaac Newton, to perform such c...

The subtle patterns and dynamic of gender pervade all areas of religion, both explicitly and implicitly, whether fully recognized or unacknowledged. Widely debated and often misunderstood, gender concerns have immense significance in conte...

Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner - 1936 Introduction William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is considered by many critics and scholars to be one of the most important and influential American novels by one of the greatest au...

An abscess is a pus-filled sore, usually caused by a bacterial infection. It results from the body's defensive reaction to foreign material. Abscesses are often found in the soft tissue under the skin, such as the armpit or the groin. Howe...

Absolute value is an operation in mathematics, written as bars on either side of the expression. For example, the absolute value of -1 is written as |-1|. Absolute value can be thought of in three ways. First, the absolute va...

Absorption spectroscopy is a "workhorse" technology widely used in industry and in chemistry, biology, medicine, and other fields of scientific research. Numerous sciences, including chemistry and astronomy, have reached their current stat...

The abstinence violation effect (AVE) occurs when an individual, having made a personal commitment to abstain from using a substance or to cease engaging in some other unwantedbehavior, has an initial lapse whereby the substance or behavio...

The emergence of Abstract Expressionism in New York City during the late 1930s both shocked and titillated the cultural elite of the international art scene. Abstraction itself was nothing new—modernist painters had been regulating ...

In his famous novel Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne informs us that the hero Phileas Fogg (said to have lived in London in 1872) was a stickler for certain things: "On this very 2nd of October he had dismissed James Forster, b...

Abu Abdallah Ibn Battutah Born February 25, 1304, Tangier, Morocco Died 1369, Fez Morocco Abu Abdallah Ibn Battutah, a Muslim legal scholar, was perhaps the most important traveler of the medieval period. In 30 years he journeyed 75,000 mil...