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Primo Levi

Primo Michele Levi (31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987) was a Jewish-Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947, published as Survival in Auschwitz in the United States), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table (1975), a collection of mostly autobiographical short stories each named after a chemical element as it played a role in each story, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.

Levi died in 1987 from injuries sustained in a fall from a third-story apartment landing. His death was officially ruled a suicide, although this has been disputed by some of his friends and associates and attributed to an accident.

Early life
Levi was born in 1919 in Turin, Italy, at Corso Re Umberto 75, into a liberal Jewish family. His father, Cesare, worked for the manufacturing firm Ganz and spent much of his time working abroad in Hungary, where Ganz was based. Cesare was an avid reader and autodidact. Levi's mother, Ester, known to everyone as Rina, was well educated, having attended the Istituto Maria Letizia. She too was an avid reader, played the piano, and spoke fluent French. The marriage between Rina and Cesare had been arranged by Rina's father. On their wedding day, Rina's father, Cesare Luzzati, gave Rina the apartment at Corso Re Umberto, where Primo Levi lived for almost his entire life. In 1921 Anna Maria, Levi's sister, was born; he remained close to her all her life. In 1925 he entered the Felice Rignon primary school in Turin. A thin and delicate child, he was shy and considered himself ugly; he excelled academically. His school record includes long periods of absence during which he was tutored at home, at first by Emilia Glauda and then by Marisa Zini, daughter of philosopher Zino Zini. The children spent summers with their mother in the Waldensian valleys southwest of Turin, where Rina rented a farmhouse. His father remained in the city, partly because of his dislike of the rural life, but also because of his infidelities.

In September 1930 Levi entered the Massimo d'Azeglio Royal Gymnasium a year ahead of normal entrance requirements. In class he was the youngest, the shortest and the cleverest, as well as being the only Jew. Only two boys there bullied him for being Jewish, but their animosity was traumatic. In August 1932, following two years attendance also at the Talmud Torah school in Turin to pick up the elements of doctrine and culture, he sang in the local synagogue for his Bar Mitzvah. In 1933, as was expected of all young Italian schoolboys, he joined the Avanguardisti movement for young Fascists. He avoided rifle drill by joining the ski division, and spent every Saturday during the season on the slopes above Turin. As a young boy Levi was plagued by illness, particularly chest infections, but he was keen to participate in physical activity. In his teens, Levi and a few friends would sneak into a disused sports stadium and conduct athletic competitions.

In July 1934 at the age of 14, he sat the exams for the Liceo Classico D'Azeglio, a Lyceum (sixth form or senior high school) specializing in the classics, and was admitted that year. The school was noted for its well-known anti-Fascist teachers, among them the philosopher Norberto Bobbio, and Cesare Pavese, who later became one of Italy's best-known novelists. Levi continued to be bullied during his time at the Lyceum, although six other Jews were in his class. Upon reading Concerning the Nature of Things by English scientist Sir William Bragg, Levi decided that he wanted to be a chemist.

In 1937, he was summoned before the War Ministry and accused of ignoring a draft notice from the Italian Royal Navy—one day before he was to write a final examination on Italy's participation in the Spanish Civil War, based on a quote from Thucydides: "We have the singular merit of being brave to the utmost degree." Distracted and terrified by the draft accusation, he failed the exam—the first poor grade of his life—and was devastated. His father was able to keep him out of the Navy by enrolling him in the Fascist militia (Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale). He remained a member through his first year of university, until the passage of the Italian Racial Laws of 1938 forced his expulsion. Levi later recounted this series of events in the short story "Fra Diavolo on the Po".

He retook and passed his final examinations, and in October enrolled at the University of Turin to study chemistry. As one of 80 candidates, he spent three months taking lectures, and in February, after passing his colloquio (oral examination), he was selected as one of 20 to move on to the full-time chemistry curriculum.

In the liberal period as well as in the first decade of the Fascist regime, Jews held many public positions, and were prominent in literature, science and politics. In 1929 Mussolini signed an agreement with the Catholic Church, the Lateran Treaty, which established Catholicism as the State religion, allowed the Church to influence many sectors of education and public life, and relegated other religions to the status of "tolerated cults". In 1936 Italy's conquest of Ethiopia and the expansion of what the regime regarded as the Italian "colonial empire" brought the question of "race" to the forefront. In the context set by these events, and the 1940 alliance with Hitler's Germany, the situation of the Jews of Italy changed radically.

In July 1938 a group of prominent Italian scientists and intellectuals published the "Manifesto of Race," a mixture of racial and ideological antisemitic theories from ancient and modern sources. This treatise formed the basis for the Italian Racial Laws of October 1938. After its enactment Italian Jews lost their basic civil rights, positions in public offices, and their assets. Their books were prohibited: Jewish writers could no longer publish in magazines owned by Aryans. Jewish students who had begun their course of study were permitted to continue, but new Jewish students were barred from entering university. Levi had matriculated a year earlier than scheduled enabling him to take a degree.

In 1939, Levi discovered a passion for mountain hiking. A friend, Sandro Delmastro, taught him how to hike, and they spent many weekends in the mountains above Turin. Levi later wrote about this time in the chapter "Iron" in The Periodic Table: “To see Sandro in the mountains reconciled you with the world and made you forget the nightmare weighing on Europe [...] He stirred in me a new communion with earth and sky, in which my need for freedom, the fullness of my powers, and the hunger to understand things that had driven me to chemistry converged.”

In June 1940, Italy declared war as an ally of Germany against Britain and France, and the first Allied air raids on Turin began two days later. Levi's studies continued during the bombardments. The family suffered additional strain as his father became bedridden with bowel cancer.

Chemistry
Because of the new racial laws and the increasing intensity of prevalent fascism, Levi had difficulty finding an advisor for his Ph.D dissertation, which was on the subject of Walden inversion, a study of the asymmetry of the carbon atom. Eventually taken on by Dr. Nicolò Dallaporta, he graduated in mid-1941 with full marks and merit, having submitted additional theses on x-rays and electrostatic energy. His degree certificate bore the remark, "of Jewish race". The racial laws prevented Levi from finding a suitable permanent job after graduation.

In December 1941, Levi received an informal job offer from an Italian officer to work as a chemist at an asbestos mine in San Vittore. The project was to extract nickel from the mine spoil, a challenge he accepted with pleasure. Levi later understood that, if successful, he would be aiding the German war effort, which was suffering nickel shortages in the production of armaments. The job required Levi to work under a false name with false papers. Three months later, in March 1942, his father died. Levi left the mine in June to work in Milan for the Swiss firm of A Wander Ltd on a project to extract an anti-diabetic from vegetable matter. Recruited through a fellow student at Turin University, he took the job in a Swiss company to escape the race laws. It soon became clear that the project had no chance of succeeding, but it was in no one's interest to say so.

In July 1943, King Victor Emmanuel III deposed Mussolini and appointed a new government under Marshal Pietro Badoglio, which prepared to sign the Armistice of Cassibile with the Allies. When the armistice was made public on 8 September, the Germans occupied northern and central Italy, liberated Mussolini from imprisonment and appointed him as head of the Italian Social Republic, a puppet state in German-occupied northern Italy. Levi returned to Turin to find his mother and sister in refuge in their holiday home 'La Saccarello' in the hills outside the city. The three embarked to Saint-Vincent in the Aosta Valley, where they could be hidden. Being pursued as Jews, many of whom had already been interned by the authorities, they moved up the hillside to Amay in the, a rebellious area highly suitable for guerilla activities.

Italian resistance movement
The Italian resistance movement became increasingly active in the German-occupied zone. Levi and some comrades took to the foothills of the Alps, and in October formed a partisan group in the hope of being affiliated to the liberal Giustizia e Libertà. Untrained for such a venture, he and his companions were arrested by the Fascist militia on 13 December 1943. Believing he would be shot as an Italian partisan, Levi confessed to being Jewish. He was sent to the internment camp at Fossoli near Modena.

Levi later wrote the following about the conditions at Fossoli: "We were given, on a regular basis, a food ration destined for the soldiers and at the end of January 1944, we were taken to Fossoli on a passenger train. Our conditions in the camp were quite good. There was no talk of executions and the atmosphere was quite calm. We were allowed to keep the money we had brought with us and to receive money from the outside. We worked in the kitchen in turn and performed other services in the camp. We even prepared a dining room, a rather sparse one, I must admit."

Auschwitz
Fossoli was then taken over by the Germans, who started arranging the deportations of the Jews to eastern concentration and death camps. On the second of these transports, on 21 February 1944, Levi and other inmates were transported in twelve cramped cattle trucks to Monowitz, one of the three main camps in the Auschwitz concentration camp complex. Levi (record number 174517) spent eleven months there before the camp was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945. Before their arrival, people were sorted according to whether they could work or not. An acquaintance said that it would make no difference, in the end, and declared he was unable to work and was killed immediately. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his transport, Levi was one of twenty who left the camps alive. The average life expectancy of a new entrant at the camp was three to four months.

Levi knew some German from reading German publications on chemistry; he worked to orient quickly to life in the camp without attracting the attention of the privileged inmates. He used bread to pay a more experienced Italian prisoner for German lessons and orientation in Auschwitz. He was given a smuggled soup ration each day by Lorenzo Perrone, an Italian civilian bricklayer working there as a forced labourer. Levi's professional qualifications were useful: in mid-November 1944, he secured a position as an assistant in IG Farben's Buna Werke laboratory that was intended to produce synthetic rubber. By avoiding hard labour in freezing outdoor temperatures he was able to survive; also, by stealing materials from the laboratory and trading them for extra food. Shortly before the camp was liberated by the Red Army, he fell ill with scarlet fever and was placed in the camp's sanatorium (camp hospital). On 18 January 1945, the SS hurriedly evacuated the camp as the Red Army approached, forcing all but the gravely ill on a long death march to a site further from the front, which resulted in the deaths of the vast majority of the remaining prisoners on the march. Levi's illness spared him this fate.

Although liberated on 27 January 1945, Levi did not reach Turin until 19 October 1945. After spending some time in a Soviet camp for former concentration camp inmates, he embarked on an arduous journey home in the company of former Italian prisoners of war who had been part of the Italian Army in Russia. His long railway journey home to Turin took him on a circuitous route from Poland, through Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria, and Germany – an arduous journey described especially in his 1963 work The Truce – noting the millions of displaced people on the roads and trains throughout Europe in that period.

1946–1960
Levi was almost unrecognisable on his return to Turin. Malnutrition edema had bloated his face. Sporting a scrawny beard and wearing an old Red Army uniform, he returned to Corso Re Umberto. The next few months gave him an opportunity to recover physically, re-establish contact with surviving friends and family, and start looking for work. Levi suffered from the psychological trauma of his experiences. Having been unable to find work in Turin, he started to look for work in Milan. On his train journeys, he began to tell people he met stories about his time at Auschwitz.

At a Jewish New Year party in 1946, he met Lucia Morpurgo, who offered to teach him to dance. Levi fell in love with Lucia. At about this time, he started writing poetry about his experiences in Auschwitz.

On 21 January 1946, he started work at DUCO, a Du Pont Company paint factory outside Turin. Because of the extremely limited train service, Levi stayed in the factory dormitory during the week. This gave him the opportunity to write undisturbed. He started to write the first draft of If This Is a Man. Every day he scribbled notes on train tickets and scraps of paper as memories came to him. At the end of February, he had ten pages detailing the last ten days between the German evacuation and the arrival of the Red Army. For the next ten months, the book took shape in his dormitory as he typed up his recollections each night.

On 22 December 1946, the manuscript was complete. Lucia, who now reciprocated Levi's love, helped him to edit it, to make the narrative flow more naturally. In January 1947, Levi was taking the finished manuscript around to publishers. It was rejected by Einaudi on the advice of Natalia Ginzburg, and in the United States was turned down by Little, Brown and Company on the advice of rabbi Joshua Liebman, an opinion which contributed to the neglect of his work in that country for four decades. The social wounds of the war years were still too fresh, and he had no literary experience to give him a reputation as an author.

Eventually, Levi found a publisher, Franco Antonicelli, through a friend of his sister's. Antonicelli was an amateur publisher, but as an active anti-Fascist, he supported the idea of the book.

At the end of June 1947, Levi suddenly left DUCO and teamed up with an old friend Alberto Salmoni to run a chemical consultancy from the top floor of Salmoni's parents' house. Many of Levi's experiences of this time found their way into his later writing. They made most of their money from making and supplying stannous chloride for mirror makers, delivering the unstable chemical by bicycle across the city. The attempts to make lipsticks from reptile excreta and a coloured enamel to coat teeth were turned into short stories. Accidents in their laboratory filled the Salmoni house with unpleasant smells and corrosive gases.

In September 1947, Levi married Lucia and a month later, on 11 October, If This Is a Man was published with a print run of 2,000 copies. In April 1948, with Lucia pregnant with their first child, Levi decided that the life of an independent chemist was too precarious. He agreed to work for Accatti in the family paint business which traded under the name SIVA. In October 1948, his daughter Lisa was born.

During this period, his friend Lorenzo Perrone's physical and psychological health declined. Lorenzo had been a civilian forced worker in Auschwitz, who for six months had given part of his ration and a piece of bread to Levi without asking for anything in return. The gesture saved Levi's life. In his memoir, Levi contrasted Lorenzo with everyone else in the camp, prisoners and guards alike, as someone who managed to preserve his humanity. After the war, Lorenzo could not cope with the memories of what he had seen and descended into alcoholism. Levi made several trips to rescue his old friend from the streets, but in 1952 Lorenzo died. In gratitude for his kindness in Auschwitz, Levi named both of his children, Lisa Lorenza and Renzo, after him.

In 1950, having demonstrated his chemical talents to Accatti, Levi was promoted to Technical Director at SIVA. As SIVA's principal chemist and troubleshooter, Levi travelled abroad. He made several trips to Germany and carefully engineered his contacts with senior German businessmen and scientists. Wearing short-sleeved shirts, he made sure they saw his prison camp number tattooed on his arm.

He became involved in organisations pledged to remembering and recording the horror of the camps. In 1954 he visited Buchenwald to mark the ninth anniversary of the camp's liberation from the Nazis. Levi dutifully attended many such anniversary events over the years and recounted his own experiences. In July 1957, his son Renzo was born.

Despite a positive review by Italo Calvino in L'Unità, only 1,500 copies of If This Is a Man were sold. In 1958 Einaudi, a major publisher, published it in a revised form and promoted it.

In 1958 Stuart Woolf, in close collaboration with Levi, translated If This Is a Man into English, and it was published in the UK in 1959 by Orion Press. Also in 1959 Heinz Riedt, also under close supervision by Levi, translated it into German. As one of Levi's primary reasons for writing the book was to get the German people to realise what had been done in their name, and to accept at least partial responsibility, this translation was perhaps the most significant to him.

1961–1974
Levi began writing The Truce early in 1961; it was published in 1963, almost 16 years after his first book. That year it won the first annual Premio Campiello literary award. It is often published in one volume with If This Is a Man, as it covers his long return through eastern Europe from Auschwitz. Levi's reputation was growing. He regularly contributed articles to La Stampa, the Turin newspaper. He worked to gain a reputation as a writer about subjects other than surviving Auschwitz.

In 1963, he suffered his first major bout of depression. At the time he had two young children, and a responsible job at a factory where accidents could and did have terrible consequences. He travelled and became a public figure. But the memory of what happened less than twenty years earlier still burned in his mind. Today the link between such trauma and depression is better understood. Doctors prescribed several different drugs over the years, but these had variable efficacy and side effects.

In 1964 Levi collaborated on a radio play based upon If This Is a Man with the state broadcaster RAI, and in 1966 with a theatre production.

He published two volumes of science fiction short stories under the pen name of Damiano Malabaila, which explored ethical and philosophical questions. These imagined the effects on society of inventions which many would consider beneficial, but which, he saw, would have serious implications. Many of the stories from the two books Storie naturali (Natural Histories, 1966) and Vizio di forma (Structural Defect, 1971) were later collected and published in English as The Sixth Day and Other Tales.

In 1974 Levi arranged to go into semi-retirement from SIVA in order to have more time to write. He also wanted to escape the burden of responsibility for managing the paint plant.

1975–1987
In 1975, a collection of Levi's poetry was published under the title L'osteria di Brema (The Bremen Beer Hall). It was published in English as Shema: Collected Poems.

He wrote two other highly praised memoirs, Lilit e altri racconti (Moments of Reprieve, 1978) and Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table, 1975). Moments of Reprieve deals with characters he observed during imprisonment. The Periodic Table is a collection of mostly autobiographical short stories and also includes two fictional stories that he wrote while being employed in 1941 at the asbestos mine in San Vittore. Each story is named after a chemical element and the story matter is related to that element. At London's Royal Institution on 19 October 2006, The Periodic Table was declared to be the best science book ever written.

In 1977 at the age of 58, Levi retired as a part-time consultant at the SIVA paint factory to devote himself full-time to writing. Like all his books, La chiave a stella (1978), published in the US in 1986 as The Monkey Wrench and in the UK in 1987 as The Wrench, is difficult to categorize. Some reviews describe it as a collection of stories about work and workers told by a narrator who resembles Levi. Others have called it a novel, created by the linked stories and characters. Set in the Fiat-run Russian company town of Togliattigrad, it portrays the engineer as a hero on whom others depend. The Piedmontese engineer Faussone has travelled the world as an expert in erecting cranes and bridges. Most of the stories involve the solution of industrial problems by the use of troubleshooting skills; many stories come from the author's personal experience. The underlying philosophy is that pride in one's work is necessary for fulfilment. The Wrench won the Strega Prize in 1979 and brought Levi a wider audience in Italy, though left-wing critics regretted that he did not describe the harsh working conditions on the assembly lines at Fiat.

In 1984, Levi published his only novel, If Not Now, When?—or his second novel, if The Monkey Wrench is counted. It traces the fortunes of a group of Jewish partisans behind German lines during World War II as they seek to survive and continue their fight against the occupier. With the ultimate goal of reaching Palestine to take part in the development of a Jewish national home, the partisan band reaches Poland and then German territory. There the surviving members are officially received as displaced persons in territory held by the Western allies. Finally, they succeed in reaching Italy, on their way to Palestine. The novel won both the Premio Campiello and the Premio Viareggio.

The book was inspired by events during Levi's train journey home after release from the camp, narrated in The Truce. At one point in the journey, a band of Zionists hitched their wagon to the refugee train. Levi was impressed by their strength, resolve, organisation, and sense of purpose.

Levi became a major literary figure in Italy, and his books were translated into many other languages. The Truce became a standard text in Italian schools. In 1985, he flew to the United States for a 20-day speaking tour. Although he was accompanied by Lucia, the trip was very draining for him.

In the Soviet Union his early works were not accepted by censors as he had portrayed Soviet soldiers as slovenly and disorderly rather than heroic. In Israel, a country formed partly by Jewish survivors who lived through horrors similar to those Levi described, many of his works were not translated and published until after his death.

In March 1985, he wrote the introduction to the re-publication of the autobiography of Rudolf Höss, who was commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp from 1940 to 1943. In it, he writes, "It's filled with evil ... and reading it is agony."

Also in 1985, a volume of his essays, previously published in La Stampa, was published under the title L'altrui mestiere (Other People's Trades). Levi used to write these stories and hoard them, releasing them to La Stampa at the rate of about one a week. The essays ranged from book reviews and ponderings about strange things in nature, to fictional short stories.

In 1986, his book I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved) was published. In it he tried to analyse why people behaved the way they did at Auschwitz and why some survived whilst others perished. In his typical style, he makes no judgments but presents the evidence and asks the questions. For example, one essay examines what he calls "The grey zone", those Jews who did the Germans' dirty work for them and kept the rest of the prisoners in line. He questioned, what made a concert violinist behave as a callous taskmaster?

Also in 1986, a collection of short stories, previously published in La Stampa, was assembled and published as Racconti e saggi (some of which were published in the English volume The Mirror Maker).

At the time of his death in April 1987, Levi was working on another selection of essays called The Double Bond, which took the form of letters to "La Signorina". These essays are very personal in nature. Approximately five or six chapters of this manuscript exist. Carole Angier, in her biography of Levi, describes how she tracked some of these essays down. She wrote that others were being kept from public view by Levi's close friends, to whom he gave them, and they may have been destroyed.

Posthumous publications
In March 2007, Harper's Magazine published an English translation of Levi's story "Knall", about a fictitious weapon that is fatal at close range but harmless more than a meter away. It originally appeared in his 1971 book Vizio di forma but was published in English for the first time by Harper's.

A Tranquil Star, a collection of seventeen stories translated into English by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli was published in April 2007.

In 2015, Penguin published The Complete Works of Primo Levi, ed. Ann Goldstein. This is the first time that Levi's entire oeuvre has been translated into English.

Death
Levi died on 11 April 1987 after a fall from the interior landing of his third-story apartment in Turin to the ground floor below. The coroner ruled his death a suicide. Three of his biographers (Angier, Thomson and Anissimov) agreed, but other writers (including at least one who knew him personally) questioned that determination.

In his later life, Levi indicated that he was suffering from depression; factors likely included responsibility for his elderly mother and mother-in-law, with whom he was living, and lingering traumatic memories of his experiences. According to the chief rabbi of Rome Elio Toaff, Levi telephoned him for the first time ten minutes before the incident. Levi said he found it impossible to look at his mother, who was ill with cancer, without recalling the faces of people stretched out on benches in Auschwitz. The Nobel laureate and fellow Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said, at the time, "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later."

However, several of Levi's friends and associates have argued otherwise. The Oxford sociologist Diego Gambetta noted that Levi left no suicide note, nor any other indication that he was considering suicide. Documents and testimony suggested that he had plans for both the short- and longer-term at the time. In the days before his death, he had complained to his physician of dizziness due to an operation he had undergone some three weeks earlier. After visiting the apartment complex, Gambetta suggested that Levi lost his balance and fell accidentally. The Nobel laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini, a close friend of Levi, agreed. "As a chemical engineer," she said, "he might have chosen a better way [of exiting the world] than jumping into a narrow stairwell with the risk of remaining paralyzed."

Holocaust writing
Levi is frequently referred to as a "Holocaust writer", a label he disliked. He is considered to have composed some of the most important writing about the Holocaust which has greatly contributed to the memory and understanding of the Holocaust. Philip Roth eulogized him as someone who "set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose". Martin Amis has credited Levi's work with assisting him in writing The Zone of Interest, calling him "the visionary of the Holocaust, its presiding spirit and the most perceptive of all writers on this subject."

Posthumous honors

 * In 1995, five health and human rights organizations established the Primo Levi Center in Paris to provide services to torture survivors. The Center was named for Levi because his name is "synonymous with the refusal of inhuman, cruel and degrading treatment".
 * The Primo Levi Center, a non-profit organisation dedicated to studying the history and culture of Italian Jewry, was established in New York City in 2003.
 * In 2008, the City of Turin and other partners established the International Primo Levi Studies Center to preserve and promote Levi's legacy.
 * Beginning in 2017, the Primo Levi Prize has been awarded by the German Chemical Society and the Italian Chemical Society to honor chemists for their commitment to human rights.
 * In 2019, Levi's 100th birthday was commemorated throughout the world, including the United States, Portugal, and Italy.
 * The SIVA factory has been turned into the Museo della Chimica, a chemistry museum for children. Levi's former office now holds an exhibit about his life.

In popular culture

 * Till My Tale is Told: Women's Memoirs of the Gulag (1999), uses a part of the quatrain by Coleridge quoted by Levi in The Drowned and the Saved as its title.
 * Christopher Hitchens' book The Portable Atheist, a collection of extracts of atheist texts, is dedicated to the memory of Levi, "who had the moral fortitude to refuse false consolation even while enduring the 'selection' process in Auschwitz". The dedication quotes Levi in The Drowned and the Saved, asserting, "I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day."
 * A quotation from Levi appears on the sleeve of the second album by the Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers, titled Gold Against the Soul. The quote is from Levi's poem "Song of Those Who Died in Vain".
 * David Blaine has Primo Levi's Auschwitz camp number, 174517, tattooed on his left forearm.
 * In Lavie Tidhar's novel, A Man Lies Dreaming, the protagonist encounters Levi and Ka-Tzetnik in Auschwitz and witnesses them discuss how they should write about the Holocaust. Levi says they should be "accurate and dispassionate" while Ka-Tzetnik advocates "the language of [...] pulp".
 * In the pilot episode of Black Earth Rising, Rwandan genocide survivor Kate Ashby has a therapy session addressing her survivors' guilt and suicide attempt. She tells her therapist that she has read the Primo Levi book he'd assigned her and that if she chooses to attempt suicide, she'll "take a leaf out of Mr Levi's book and jump straight out the window."
 * The last track on The Noise by Peter Hammill is entitled "Primo on the Parapet".

Nazi death camps versus Soviet gulags
Levi vigorously repudiated historical revisionist attitudes in German historiography that emerged in the Historikerstreit led by the works of people like Andreas Hillgruber and Ernst Nolte, who drew parallels between Nazism and Stalinism. Levi rejected the idea that the labor camp system depicted in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and that of the Nazi Lager (konzentrationslager; see Nazi concentration camps) were comparable. The death rate in Stalin's gulags was 30% at worst, he wrote, while in the extermination camps, he estimated it to be 90–98%.

His view was that the Nazi death camps and the attempted annihilation of the Jews were a horror unique in history because the goal was the complete destruction of a race by one that saw itself as superior. He noted that it was highly organized and mechanized; it entailed the degradation of Jews to the point of using their ashes as materials for paths.

The purpose of the Nazi extermination camps was not the same as the purpose of Stalin's gulags, Levi wrote in an appendix to If This Is a Man, though it is a "lugubrious comparison between two models of hell." The goal of the Lager was the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe, and no one could renounce Judaism; the Nazis considered Jews a racial group rather than a religious group. Levi, along with most of Turin's Jewish intellectuals, had not been religiously observant before World War II, but the Italian racial laws and the Nazi camps impressed his identity as a Jew upon him. Of the many children who were deported to the camps, almost all of them were murdered.

German people
According to biographer Ian Thomson, Levi intentionally excluded any experiences with Germans who helped him from If This Is a Man and included "collective condemnations, coloured by the author's rage, of the German people". However, Levi's opinion of Germans improved through his friendship with a German woman named Hety Schmitt-Maas. Her father had lost his job and she had been expelled from school due to their anti-Nazi beliefs. For 17 years, Levi and Schmitt-Maas discussed "their shared hatred of Nazism" together in their letters to each other until Schmitt-Maas died in 1983.

Almost forty years after If This Is A Man was published, Levi stated that he did not hate German people because hating a whole ethnic group would be too much like Nazism. However, he also stated that he did not forgive "the culprits". According to Levi, the German people largely knew about the concentration camps but did not know the extent of the atrocities occurring there. However, "most Germans didn’t know because they didn’t want to know. Because, indeed, they wanted not to know".

Adaptations

 * Five of Levi's poems (Shema, 25 Febbraio 1944, Il canto del corvo, Cantare and Congedo) have been set to music by Simon Sargon in the song cycle Shema: 5 Poems of Primo Levi in 1987. In 2021 the work was performed by Megan Marie Hart during the opening event of the festival year 1700 Jahre jüdisches Leben in Deutschland commemorating the first documented mention of Jewish communities in the territory of present-day Germany.
 * The 1997 film La Tregua (The Truce), starring John Turturro, was adapted from his 1963 memoir of the same title and recounts Levi's long journey home with other displaced people after his liberation from Auschwitz.
 * If This Is a Man was adapted by Antony Sher into a one-man stage production Primo in 2004. A version of this production was broadcast on BBC Four in the UK on 20 September 2007.

title: Primo Levi


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Wikipedia:Federal Standard 1037C terms/telecommunications transmission terms

This is a list of telecommunications transmission terms derived from the Glossary of Telecommunication Terms published as Federal Standard 1037C. Please see the Federal Standard article for copyright-related issues, as not all parts of the source document are in the public domain.

Noise
ambient noise level — antenna noise temperature — atmospheric noise — background noise — blue noise — carrier noise level — carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) — carrier-to-receiver noise density (C/kT) — channel noise level — circuit noise level — closed-loop noise bandwidth — C-message weighting — cosmic noise — effective input noise temperature — equipment intermodulation noise — equivalent noise resistance — equivalent noise temperature — equivalent pulse code modulation noise (PCM) — equivalent satellite link noise temperature — feeder echo noise — flat weighting — FM improvement factor — FM improvement threshold — front-end noise temperature — HA1-receiver weighting — idle-channel noise — impulse noise — in-band noise power ratio — intermodulation noise — intrinsic noise — loop noise — modal noise — mode partition noise — noise — notched noise — 144-line weighting — 144-receiver weighting — phase noise — photon noise — process gain — proration — pseudorandom noise — psophometric weighting — quantizing noise — quantum noise — quantum-noise-limited operation — random noise — received noise power — reference noise — shot noise — signal-plus-noise-to-noise ratio ((S+N)/N) — signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) — signal-to-noise ratio per bit — SINAD — snow — stereophonic crosstalk — thermal noise — total channel noise — white noise — worst hour of the year

Transmission and propagation
absolute delay — analog transmission — anisochronous — anomalous propagation (AP) — asynchronous transmission — atmospheric duct — babble — backscattering — batched transmission — bit-stream transmission — burst transmission — channel — coupled modes — critical frequency — critical wavelength — cross-polarized operation — Dellinger effect — digital transmission group — digital transmission system — digital voice transmission — diurnal phase shift — double-sideband transmission (DSB) — double-sideband reduced carrier transmission (DSB-RC) — double-sideband suppressed-carrier transmission (DSB-SC) — D region — ducting — duplex operation — echo — electronic line of sight — elevated duct region erlang — flutter — forward scatter — Frequency of optimum transmission (FOT) — F region — Fresnel zone — ground wave — group velocity — homogeneous cladding — intermediate-field region — ionosphere — ionospheric absorption — ionospheric disturbance — ionospheric forward scatter — ionospheric reflection — ionospheric scatter — ionospheric turbulence — isochronous burst transmission — k-factor — knife-edge effect — line-of-sight propagation (LOS) — magnetic storm — magneto-ionic double refraction — material scattering — maximum usable frequency (MUF) — Mie scattering — multipath — near-field region — near-vertical-incidence skywave — parallel transmission — path clearance — path profile — primary service area — propagation — propagation constant — propagation mode — propagation path obstruction — propagation time delay — pulse broadening — quasi-analog transmission — radiation scattering — ray — Rayleigh fading — Rayleigh scattering — reflecting layer — reflection — refracted ray — refraction — refractive index (n, ) — relative transmission level — right-hand (clockwise) polarized wave — ring latency — scattering — scintillation — serial transmission — shadow loss — simplex operation — skip distance — skip zone — sky wave — smooth Earth — space diversity — sporadic E — sunspot — surface wave — synchronous transmission — time block — trapped electromagnetic wave — troposphere — tropospheric scatter — tropospheric wave — undisturbed day — virtual height — waveguide

Transmission lines
artificial transmission line — balanced line — building out — bundle — cable — Category 3 — Category 4 — Category 5 — coaxial cable (coax) — composite cable — direct-buried cable — directional coupler — electrical length — fiber optic cable — field wire — filled cable — group delay — hybrid cable — land line — lay length — line — long line (telecommunications) — loop — medium — nonloaded twisted pair — on-premises wiring — open wire — paired cable — plenum cable — quad — quadded cable — reflection — reflection coefficient (RC) — return loss — ribbon cable — sheath — sheath miles — shielded pair — shielded twisted pair — skin effect — slope — slope equalizer — spiral-four cable — strength member — symmetrical pair — terminal impedance — termination — transmission line — transverse electric and magnetic mode (TEM) — transverse electric mode (TE) — twin cable — unbalanced line — underground cable — uniform transmission line — voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) — waveguide — zip-cord

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are figures in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament of the Bible, a piece of apocalypse literature attributed to John of Patmos. Similar allusions are contained in the Old Testament books of Ezekiel and Zechariah, written about six centuries prior. Though the text only provides a name for the fourth horseman, subsequent commentary often identifies them as personifications of Conquest (Zelos), War (Martius), Famine (Limos), and Death (Thánatos or Móros).

Revelation 6 tells of a book or scroll in God's right hand that is sealed with seven seals. The Lamb of God/Lion of Judah opens the first four of the seven seals, which summons four beings that ride out on white, red, black, and pale horses. All of the horsemen save for Death are portrayed as being human in appearance.

In John's revelation the first horseman rides a white horse, carries a bow, and is given a crown as a figure of conquest, perhaps invoking pestilence, or the Antichrist. The second carries a sword and rides a red horse as the creator of (civil) war, conflict, and strife. The third, a food merchant, rides a black horse symbolizing famine and carries the scales. The fourth and final horse is pale, upon it rides Death, accompanied by Hades. "They were given authority over a quarter of the Earth, to kill with sword, famine and plague, and by means of the beasts of the Earth." Christianity interprets the Four Horsemen as a vision of harbingers of the Last Judgment, setting a divine end-time upon the world.

White Horse

The above passage is a common English translation of the rider of the White Horse (sometimes referred to as the White Rider). He is thought to carry a bow (Greek τόξον, tóxon) and wear a victor's crown (Greek στέφανος, stéphanos).

According to the Interpretātiō Graecǎ, he is Zelos (Ζῆλος, Zêlos (latinized as Zēlus), literally "Zeal" or "Jealousy"), daimon/deity of conquest and glory.

As Christ, the Gospel, or the Holy Spirit
For the broad historical interpretation of Christ as the rider of the white horse, it is to be understood that the Antichrist does not appear until the opening of the sixth seal. Events in world history since the founding of Christianity were interpreted as "horses" up to the sixth seal event. Therefore, this interpretation can be seen as either partially preterist, or an instance of dual fulfillment. In the New Testament, the Book of Mark indicates that the advance of the gospel may precede and foretell the apocalypse. The colour white also tends to represent righteousness in the Bible, and Christ is portrayed as a conqueror in other instances.

Besides Christ, the Horseman could represent the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was understood to have come upon the Apostles at Pentecost after Jesus departed Earth. The appearance of the Lion in Revelation 5 shows the triumphant arrival of Jesus in Heaven, and the first Horseman may represent the sending of the Holy Spirit by Jesus and the advance of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

As the Antichrist
In 1866, when C. F. Zimpel defended the hypothesis that the first horseman was the Antichrist (and more precisely, according to him, Napoleon Bonaparte). The Antichrist interpretation later found champions in the United States, such as R. F. Franklin in 1898 and W. C. Stevens in 1928. It remains popular in evangelical circles today, for example with Pastor Billy Graham, for whom the horseman represented the Antichrist or false prophets in general.

As Roman Empire prosperity
In Edward Bishop Elliott's interpretation, the Four Horsemen represent a prophecy of the Roman Empire's subsequent history; the horse's white colour signifies triumph, prosperity, and health in the Roman political body. For the next 80 or 90 years, succeeding the banishment of the prophet John to the island of Patmos and covering the successive reigns of the emperors Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines (Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius), a golden age of prosperity, union, civil liberty and good government unstained with civil blood unfolded. The agents of this prosperity, personified by the rider of the white horse, are these five emperors wearing crowns, who reigned with absolute authority and power under the guidance of virtue and wisdom, the armies being restrained by their firm and gentle hands.

This interpretation points out that the bow was preeminently a weapon of the inhabitants of the island of Crete and not of the Roman Empire in general. The Cretans were renowned for their archery skills. The significance of the rider of the white horse holding a bow indicates the place of origin of the line of emperors ruling during this time. This group of emperors can be classed together under one and the same head and family whose origins were from Crete.

According to this interpretation, this period in Roman history, both at its commencement and close, illustrated the empire's glory where its limits were extended, though not without occasional wars, which were always uniformly triumphant on the frontiers. The triumphs of Emperor Trajan, a Roman Alexander, added to the empire Dacia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, and other provinces during the first 20 years of the period, which deepened the impression on the minds of the barbarians of the invincibility of the Roman Empire. The Roman war progressed triumphantly into the invader's territory, and the total overthrow of those people successfully ended the Parthian war. Roman conquest is demonstrated even in the most mighty of these wars: the Marcomannic Wars, a succession of victories under the second Antonine, unleashed on the German barbarians, who were driven into their forests and reduced to Roman submission.

As war
In some commentaries, the white Horseman symbolizes war, which may be decently exercised on moral grounds, hence the white colour. The red Horseman (see below) specifically symbolizes civil war.

As infectious disease
Under another interpretation, the first Horseman is called Pestilence and is associated with infectious disease and plague. It appears at least as early as 1906 in the Jewish Encyclopedia. This particular interpretation is common in popular culture references to the Four Horsemen.

The origin of this interpretation is unclear. Some translations of the Bible mention "plague" (e.g. the New International Version) or "pestilence" (e.g. the Revised Standard Version) in connection with the riders in the passage following the introduction of the fourth rider; cf. "They were given power over a fourth of the Earth to kill by sword, famine, plague, and by the wild beasts of the Earth." in the NASB. However, the original Greek does not use the word for "plague" or "pestilence" here, simply "death" (θᾰ́νᾰτος, thánatos). The use of "pestilence" was likely drawn from other parts of the Book of Revelation and included here as another form of death. Also, whether this passage refers to the fourth rider only or the four riders as a whole is a matter of debate.

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, in his 1916 novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (filmed in 1921 and 1962), provides an early example of this interpretation, writing, "The horseman on the white horse was clad in a showy and barbarous attire. . . . While his horse continued galloping, he was bending his bow in order to spread pestilence abroad. At his back swung the brass quiver filled with poisoned arrows, containing the germs of all diseases".

Red Horse

The rider of the second horse is often taken to represent War (he is often pictured holding a sword upwards as though ready for battle) or mass slaughter. His horse's colour is red (πυρρός, purrhós from πῦρ, fire), and in some translations, the colour is specifically a "fiery" red. The colour red, as well as the rider's possession of a great sword (μάχαιρα, mákhaira), suggests blood that is to be spilled. As seen in heraldry, the sword held upward by the second Horseman may represent war or a declaration of war. In military symbolism, swords held upward, especially crossed swords held upward, signify war and entering into battle (see, for example, the historical and modern images and the coat of arms of Joan of Arc).

The second Horseman represents civil war as opposed to the war of conquest that the first Horseman is said to bring. Other commentators have suggested that it might also represent the persecution of Christians.

According to the Interpretātiō Graecǎ, he is Ares (Ἄρης, Árēs (latinized as Ărēs), literally "Bane" or "War"), spirit/god of war and battle.

As empire division
According to Edward Bishop Elliott's interpretation of the Four Horsemen as symbolic prophecy of the history of the Roman Empire, the second seal is opened and the Roman nation that experienced joy, prosperity, and triumph is made subject to the red horse which depicts war and bloodshed—civil war. Peace left the Roman Earth, resulting in the killing of one another as insurrection crept into and permeated the Empire, beginning shortly into the reign of Emperor Commodus.

Elliott points out that Commodus, who had nothing to wish for and everything to enjoy, that beloved son of Marcus Aurelius who ascended the throne with neither competitor to remove nor enemies to punish, became the slave of his attendants who gradually corrupted his mind.

Elliott further recites that, after the death of Commodus, a most turbulent period lasting 92 years unfolded, during which time 32 emperors and 27 pretenders to the Empire hurled each other from the throne by incessant civil warfare. The sword was a natural universal badge, among the Romans, of the military profession. The apocalyptic figure armed with a great sword indicated an undue authority and unnatural use of it. Military men in power, whose vocation was war and weapon the sword, rose by it and also fell. The unrestrained military, no longer subject to the Senate, transformed the Empire into a system of pure military despotism.

Black Horse

The third Horseman rides a black horse and is popularly understood to be Famine, as the Horseman carries a pair of balances or weighing scales (Greek ζυγόν, zugón), indicating the way that bread would have been weighed during a famine. The rider is typically portrayed as an emaciated man. Other authors interpret the third Horseman as the "Lord as a Law-Giver", holding Scales of Justice. In the passage, it is read that the indicated price of grain is about ten times normal (thus the famine interpretation popularity), with an entire day's wages (a denarius) buying enough wheat for only one person (one choenix, about 1.1 litres), or enough of the less nutritious barley for three, so that workers would struggle to feed their families. In the Gospels, the denarius is repeatedly mentioned as a monetary unit; for example, the denarius was the pay of a soldier for one day, and the day labor of a seasonal worker in the harvesting of grapes is also valued at one denarius. Thus, it is probably a fact that with the approach of the Apocalypse, the most necessary food will rise in price greatly and the wages earned per day will be enough only for the minimum subsistence for the same day and nothing more.

Of the Four Horsemen, the black horse and its rider are the only ones whose appearance is accompanied by vocalization. John hears a voice, unidentified but coming from among the four living creatures, that speaks of the prices of wheat and barley, saying, "and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine". This suggests that the black horse's famine is to drive up the price of grain but leave oil and wine supplies unaffected (though out of reach of the ordinary worker). One explanation is that grain crops would have been more naturally susceptible to famine years or locust plagues than olive trees and grapevines, which root more deeply.

The statement might also suggest a continuing abundance of luxuries for the wealthy, while staples, such as bread, are scarce, though not completely depleted; such selective scarcity may result from injustice and the deliberate production of luxury crops for the wealthy over grain, as would have happened during the time the Book of Revelation was written. Alternatively, the preservation of oil and wine could symbolize the preservation of the Christian faithful, who use oil and wine in their sacraments.

According to the Interpretātiō Graecǎ, he is Limos (Λῑμός, Līmós (latinized as Līmus), literally "Hunger", "Starvation" or "Famine"), personification/deity of famine.

As imperial oppression
According to Edward Bishop Elliott's interpretation, through this third seal, the black horse is unleashed, representing aggravated distress and mourning. The balance in the rider's hand is not associated with a man weighing out bread for his family but with buying and selling corn and other grains. During the time of the apostle John's exile in Patmos, the balance was commonly a symbol of justice since it was used to weigh grains for a set price. The balance of justice held in the hand of the rider of the black horse signified the aggravation of the other previous evil, with the bloodstained red of the Roman aspect morphing into the darker blackness of distress. The black horse rider is instructed not to harm the oil and the wine, which signifies that this scarcity should not fall upon the superfluities, such as oil and wine, which men can live without, but upon the necessities of life—bread.

This interpretation also borrows from Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which claims the Roman Empire suffered as a result of excessive taxation of its citizens, particularly during the reign of Emperor Caracalla, whom history has primarily remembered as a cruel tyrant and among the worst of the Roman emperors. Under the necessity of gratifying the greed and excessive lifestyle which Caracalla had excited in the army, old as well as new taxes, were at the same time levied in the provinces. The land tax, taxes for services, and heavy contributions of corn, wine, oil, and meat were exacted from the provinces for court, army, and capital use.

According to Gibbon, this was exacerbated by the rise to power of Emperor Maximin, who "attacked the public property at length". Every city of the empire was destined to purchase corn for the multitudes, as well as supply expenses for the games. By the Emperor's authority, the whole mass of wealth was confiscated for use by the Imperial treasury—temples "stripped of their most valuable offerings of gold, silver [and statues] which were melted down and coined into money".

Pale Horse

The fourth and final Horseman is named Death (Greek: Θᾰ́νᾰτος, Thánatos, Latin: Mŏrs or Thanatus).

Death, known in Latin as Mŏrs and in Greek as Thánatos (Θᾰ́νᾰτος), of all the riders, he is the only one to whom the text itself explicitly gives a name. Unlike the other three, he is not described as carrying a weapon or other object, instead, he is followed by Hades (Greek: ᾍδης, Hā́idēs, latinized as Hādēs), which here refers not to the pagan god of death and his abode in Greek mythology, but simply to the place of the dead in the Greek language, and which is called Īnfernus ("[the] Underworld", a clipping of īnfernus lŏcus, "[the] lower place") in Latin. However, illustrations commonly depict him carrying a scythe, sword, or another implement, he is no different than typical portrayals of Death, and is the only horseman who doesn’t appear to be a human.

The colour of Death's horse is written as pàllidus in Latin and as χλωρός (khlōrós, latinized as chlōrus) in the original Koine Greek, which can mean either green/greenish-yellow or pale/pallid in both languages. The colour is often translated as "pale", though "ashen", "pale green", and "yellowish green" are other possible interpretations (the Greek word is the root of "chlorophyll" and "chlorine"). Based on the uses of the word in ancient Greek medical literature, several scholars suggest that the colour reflects the sickly pallor of a corpse. In some modern artistic depictions, the horse is distinctly green.

The verse beginning with "they were given power over a fourth of the Earth" is generally taken as referring to Death and Hades, although some commentators see it as applying to all four horsemen.

According to the Interpretātiō Graecǎ, he is Moros (Μόρος, Móros (latinized as Mŏrus), literally "Fate" or "Doom"), personification/deity of impending doom.

Destroying an empire
This fourth, pale horse, was the personification of Death, with Hades following him, jaws open and receiving the victims slain by Death. Death's commission was to kill upon the Roman Earth with all of the four judgments of God—with sword, famine, pestilence, and wild beasts. The deadly pale and livid appearance displays a hue symptomatic of approaching empire dissolution. According to Edward Bishop Elliott, an era in Roman history commencing within about 15 years after the death of Severus Alexander (in AD 235) strongly marks every point of this terrible emblem.

Edward Gibbon speaks of a period from the celebration of the great secular games by the Emperor Philip to the death of Gallienus (in AD 268) as the 20 years of shame and misfortune, of confusion and calamity, as a time when the ruined empire approached the last and fatal moment of its dissolution. Every instant of time in every province of the Roman world was afflicted by military tyrants and barbarous invaders—the sword from within and without.

According to Elliott, famine, the inevitable consequence of carnage and oppression, which demolished the present crop as well as the hope of future harvests, produced the environment for an epidemic of diseases, the effects of scanty and unwholesome food. That furious plague (the Plague of Cyprian), which raged from 250 to 265, continued without interruption in every province, city and almost every family in the empire. During a portion of this time, 5000 people died daily in Rome; and many towns that had escaped the attacks of barbarians were entirely depopulated.

For a time in the late 260s, the strength of Aurelian crushed the enemies of Rome, yet after his assassination a certain amount of them revived. While the Goths had been destroyed for almost a century and the Empire reunited, the Sassanid Persians were uncowed in the East and, during the following year, hosts of central Asian Alani spread themselves over Pontus, Cappadocia, Cilicia, and Galatia, etching their course by the flames of cities and villages they pillaged.

As for the wild beasts of the Earth, according to Elliott, it is a well-known law of nature that they quickly occupy the scenes of waste and depopulation—where the reign of man fails and the reign of beasts begins. After the reign of Gallienus and 20 or 30 years had passed, the multiplication of the animals had risen to such an extent in parts of the empire that they made it a 'crying evil'.

One notable point of apparent difference between the prophecy and history might seem to be expressly limited to the fourth part of the Roman Earth, but in the history of the period, the devastation of the pale horse extended over all. The fourth seal prophecy seems to mark the malignant climax of the evils of the two preceding seals, to which no such limitation is attached. Turning to a reading in Jerome's Latin Vulgate which reads "over the four parts of the Earth", it requires that the Roman empire should have some kind of quadripartition. Dividing from the central or Italian fourth, three great divisions of the Empire separated into the West, East, and Illyricum under Posthumus, Aureolus, and Zenobia respectively—divisions that were later legitimized by Diocletian.

Diocletian ended this long period of anarchy, but the succession of civil wars and invasions caused much suffering, disorder and crime, which brought the empire into a state of moral lethargy from which it never recovered. After the plague had abated, the empire suffered from general distress, and its condition was very much like that which followed after the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Talent and art had become extinct in proportion to the desolation of the world.

Christological interpretation
Before the Reformation and the woodcut by Albrecht Dürer, the usual and more influential commentaries of the Book of Revelation thought there was only one horseman riding successively these four horses, who was the Christ himself. So did some medieval illuminations, and after that some modern commentators: Oecumenius, a Greek exegete writing in the sixth century, Berengaudus a French Benedictine monk of Ferrières Abbey at the same period, Luis del Alcázar a Spanish Jesuit in 1612, Benito Arias Montano, a Spanish Orientalist, in 1622, Jacques de Bordes, a French capuchin in 1639, Emanuel Swedenborg a Swedish theologian in 1766.

Prophetic interpretation
Some Christians interpret the Horsemen as a prophecy of a future Tribulation, during which many on Earth will die as a result of multiple catastrophes. The Four Horsemen are the first in a series of "Seal" judgments. This is when God will judge the Earth, and is giving humans a chance to repent before they die. A new beautiful Earth is created for all the people who are faithful to Him and accept him as their Savior.

John Walvoord, a premillennialist, believed the Seals will be opened during the Great Tribulation and coincides with the arrival of the Antichrist as the first horseman, a global war as the second horseman, an economic collapse as the third horseman, and the general die-off of one quarter of the World's population as the fourth horseman; which is followed by a global dictatorship under the Antichrist and the rest of the plagues.

Historicist interpretation
According to E. B. Elliott, the first seal, as revealed to John by the angel, was to signify what was to happen soon after John seeing the visions in Patmos, and that the second, third, and fourth seals in like manner were to have commencing dates each in chronological sequence following the preceding seal. Its general subject is the decline and fall, after a previous prosperous era, of the Empire of Heathen Rome. The first four seals of Revelation, represented by four horses and horsemen, are fixed to events, or changes, within the Roman Earth.

Preterist interpretation
Some modern scholars interpret Revelation from a preterist point of view, arguing that its prophecy and imagery apply only to the events of the first century of Christian history. In this school of thought, Conquest, the white horse's rider, is sometimes identified as a symbol of Parthian forces: Conquest carries a bow, and the Parthian Empire was at that time known for its mounted warriors and their skill with bow and arrow. Parthians were also particularly associated with white horses. Some scholars specifically point to Vologases I, a Parthian shah who clashed with the Roman Empire and won one significant battle in AD 62.

Revelation's historical context may also influence the depiction of the black horse and its rider, Famine. In AD 92, the Roman emperor Domitian attempted to curb excessive growth of grapevines and encourage grain cultivation instead, but there was a major popular backlash against this effort, and it was abandoned. Famine's mission to make wheat and barley scarce but "hurt not the oil and the wine" could be an allusion to this episode. The red horse and its rider, who take peace from the Earth, might represent the prevalence of civil strife at the time Revelation was written; internecine conflict ran rampant in the Roman Empire during and just prior to the 1st century AD.

Latter-day Saint interpretation
Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe the prophet, Joseph Smith, revealed that the book described by John "contains the revealed will, mysteries, and the works of God; the hidden things of his economy concerning this Earth during the seven thousand years of its continuance, or its temporal existence" and that the seals describe these things for the seven thousand years of the Earth's temporal existence, each seal representing 1,000 years.

About the first seal and the white horse, LDS Apostle Bruce R. McConkie taught, "The most transcendent happenings involved Enoch and his ministry. What John saw was not the establishment of Zion and its removal to heavenly spheres, but the unparalleled wars in which Enoch, as a general over the armies of the saints, 'went forth conquering and to conquer' Revelation 6:2; see also Moses 7:13–18." The second seal and the red horse represent the period from approximately 3,000 BC to 2,000 BC, including the wickedness and violence leading to the Great Flood.

The third seal and black horse describe the period of ancient Joseph, son of Israel, who was sold into Egypt, and the famines that swept that period (see Genesis 41–42; Abraham 1:29–30; 2:1, 17, 21). The fourth seal and the pale horse are interpreted to represent the thousand years leading up to the birth of Jesus Christ, both the physical death brought about by great warring empires and the spiritual death through apostasy among the Lord's chosen people.

Other interpretations
Artwork which shows the Horsemen as a group, such as the famous woodcut by Albrecht Dürer, suggests an interpretation where all four horsemen represent different aspects of the same tribulation.

American Protestant Evangelical interpreters regularly see ways in which the horsemen, and Revelation in general, speak to contemporary events. Some who believe Revelation applies to modern times can interpret the horses based on the various ways their colours are used. Red, for example, often represents Communism, the white horse and rider with a crown representing Catholicism, Black has been used as a symbol of Capitalism, while Green represents the rise of Islam. Pastor Irvin Baxter Jr. of Endtime Ministries espoused such a belief.

Some equate the Four Horsemen with the angels of the four winds. (See Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel, angels often associated with four cardinal directions).

Some speculate that when the imagery of the Six Seals is compared to other eschatological descriptions throughout the Bible, the themes of the horsemen draw remarkable similarity to the events of the Olivet Discourse. The signs of the approaching end of the world are likened to birth pains, indicating that they would occur more frequently and with greater intensity the nearer the event of Christ's return. With this perspective the horsemen represent the rise of false religions, false prophets, and false messiahs; the increase of wars and rumours of wars; the escalation of natural disasters and famines; and the growth of persecution, martyrdom, betrayal, and loss of faith.

According to Anatoly Fomenko, the Book of Revelation is largely astrological in nature. The 'Four Horsemen' represent the planets Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

Zechariah
The Book of Zechariah twice mentions coloured horses; in the first passage there are three colours (red, speckled/brown, and white), and in the second there are four teams of horses (red, black, white, and finally dappled/"grisled and bay") pulling chariots. The second set of horses are referred to as "the four spirits of heaven, going out from standing in the presence of the Lord of the whole world." They are described as patrolling the Earth and keeping it peaceful. It may be assumed by some Christian interpretations that when the tribulation begins, the peace is taken away, so their job is to terrify the places in which they patrol.

Ezekiel
The four living creatures of Revelation 4:6–8 are written similarly to the four living creatures in Ezekiel 1:5–12. In Revelation, each of the living creatures summons a horseman, where in Ezekiel the living creatures follow wherever the spirit leads, without turning.

In Ezekiel 14:21, the Lord enumerates His "four disastrous acts of judgment" (ESV), sword, famine, wild beasts, and pestilence, against the idolatrous elders of Israel. A symbolic interpretation of the Four Horsemen links the riders to these judgments, or the similar judgments in 6:11–12.

title: Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse


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New Scientist

New Scientist is a popular science magazine covering all aspects of science and technology. Based in London, it publishes weekly English-language editions in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. An editorially separate organisation publishes a monthly Dutch-language edition. First published on 22 November 1956, New Scientist has been available in online form since 1996.

Sold in retail outlets (paper edition) and on subscription (paper and/or online), the magazine covers news, features, reviews and commentary on science, technology and their implications. New Scientist also publishes speculative articles, ranging from the technical to the philosophical.

New Scientist was acquired by Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) in March 2021.

Ownership
The magazine was founded in 1956 by Tom Margerison, Max Raison and Nicholas Harrison as The New Scientist, with Issue 1 on 22 November 1956, priced at one shilling (a twentieth of a pound in pre-decimal UK currency; ). An article in the magazine's 10th anniversary issues provides anecdotes on the founding of the magazine. The British monthly science magazine Science Journal, published from 1965 until 1971, was merged with New Scientist to form New Scientist and Science Journal. In 1970, the Reed Group, which became Reed Elsevier, acquired New Scientist when it merged with IPC Magazines. Reed retained the magazine when it sold most of its consumer titles in a management buyout to what is now TI Media. In April 2017 New Scientist changed ownership when RELX Group, formerly known as Reed Elsevier, sold the magazine to Kingston Acquisitions, a group established by Sir Bernard Gray, Louise Rogers and Matthew O'Sullivan to acquire New Scientist. Kingston Acquisitions then renamed itself New Scientist Ltd. The New Scientist was subsequently sold to the Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) for £70 million in March 2021; DMGT guaranteed the magazine's editorial independence, and ruled out staff cuts and the sharing of editorial content.

In December 2021, DMGT announced that both New Scientist and the DMGT-owned daily i newspaper would be moved to a new division of the company, to be called Harmsworth Media.

General history
Originally, the cover of New Scientist listed articles in plain text. Initially, page numbering followed academic practice with sequential numbering for each quarterly volume. So, for example, the first page of an issue in March could be 649 instead of 1. Later issues numbered issues separately. From the beginning of 1961 "The" was dropped from the title. From 1965, the front cover was illustrated. Until the 1970s, colour was not used except on the cover.

Since its first issue, New Scientist has written about the applications of science, through its coverage of technology. For example, the first issue included an article "Where next from Calder Hall?" on the future of nuclear power in the UK, a topic that it has covered throughout its history. In 1964, there was a regular "Science in British Industry" section with several items.

Throughout most of its history, New Scientist has published cartoons as light relief and comment on the news, with contributions from regulars such as Mike Peyton and David Austin. The Grimbledon Down comic strip, by cartoonist Bill Tidy, appeared from 1970 to 1994. The Ariadne pages in New Scientist commented on the lighter side of science and technology and included contributions from David E. H. Jones, Daedalus. The fictitious inventor devised plausible but impractical and humorous inventions, often developed by the (fictitious) DREADCO corporation. Daedalus later moved to Nature.

Issues of (The) New Scientist from issue 1 to the end of 1989 are free to read online; subsequent issues require a subscription.

In the first half of 2013, the international circulation of New Scientist averaged 125,172. While this was a 4.3% reduction on the previous year's figure, it was a much smaller reduction in circulation than many mainstream magazines of similar or greater circulation. UK circulation fell by 3.2% in 2014, but stronger international sales increased the circulation to 129,585.

A monthly Dutch edition of New Scientist was launched in June 2015. It replaced the former Natuurwetenschap & Techniek (NWT) magazine, adopting its staff and subscribers. The editorially independent magazine is published by Veen Media. It contains mainly translations of articles in the English-language edition, but also its own articles. These are typically focused on research in the Netherlands and Belgium, the main countries where it is purchased.

Modern format
In the 21st century, until May 2019, New Scientist contained the following sections: Leader, News (Upfront), Technology, Opinion (interviews, point-of-view articles and letters), Features (including cover article), CultureLab (book and event reviews), Feedback (humour), The Last Word (questions and answers) and Jobs & Careers. A Tom Gauld cartoon appears on the Letters page. A readers' letters section discusses recent articles and discussions also take place on the website. Readers contribute observations on examples of pseudoscience to Feedback, and offer questions and answers on scientific and technical topics to Last Word. New Scientist has produced a series of books compiled from contributions to Last Word.

From issue 3228 of 4 May 2019, New Scientist introduced a "slightly updated design, with ... a fresher, brighter feel". A dedicated "Views" section was added between news reports and in-depth features, including readers' letters, comment, and reviews on science, culture and society. Regular columnists were introduced, and columns in the culture pages. The light-hearted "Back Pages" includes the long-standing Feedback and The Last Word, puzzles, and a Q&A section.

Online readership takes various forms. Overall global views of an online database of over 100,000 articles are 10.8m by 7m unique users according to Google Analytics,. On social media there are 3.5m+ Twitter followers, 3.5m+ Facebook followers and 100,000+ Instagram followers.

Staff and contributors
Emily Wilson was appointed editor-in-chief in 2018. Current staff members are listed on page 5 of the magazine. Columnists included Annalee Newitz on novel tech. James Wong on food myths, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's adventures in space-time and Graham Lawton on environment.

Editors of New Scientist

 * Percy Cudlipp (1956–1962)
 * Nigel Calder (1962–1966)
 * Donald Gould (1966–1969)
 * Bernard Dixon (1969–1979)
 * Michael Kenward (1979–1990)
 * David Dickson (1990–1992)
 * Alun Anderson (1992–1999)
 * Jeremy Webb (1999–2008)
 * Roger Highfield (2008–2011)
 * Sumit Paul-Choudhury (2011–2018)
 * Emily Wilson (2018–2023)
 * Catherine de Lange (2023–)

Spin-offs
New Scientist has published books derived from its content, many of which are selected questions and answers from the "Last Word" section of the magazine and website:
 * 1998. The Last Word. ISBN 978-0-19-286199-3
 * 2000. The Last Word 2. ISBN 978-0-19-286204-4
 * 2005. Does Anything Eat Wasps?. ISBN 978-1-86197-973-5
 * 2006. Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze?. (selections from the first two books) ISBN 978-1-86197-876-9
 * 2007. How to Fossilise Your Hamster. ISBN 978-1-84668-044-1
 * 2008. Do Polar Bears Get Lonely?. ISBN 978-1-84668-130-1
 * 2009. How to Make a Tornado: The strange and wonderful things that happen when scientists break free. ISBN 978-1-84668-287-2
 * 2010. Why Can't Elephants Jump?. ISBN 978-1-84668-398-5
 * 2011. Why Are Orangutans Orange?: science questions in picture. ISBN 978-1-84668-507-1
 * 2012. Will We Ever Speak Dolphin?. ISBN 978-1-78125-026-6
 * 2014. Question Everything. ISBN 978-1-78125-164-5

Other books published by New Scientist include:
 * The Anti Zoo – 50 freaks of nature you won't see on TV (e-book based on the website's "Zoologger" column)
 * Nothing: Surprising insights everywhere from zero to oblivion. (compilation of articles previously published in the magazine) ISBN 978-1-61519-205-2
 * New Scientist: The Collection (compendiums of articles on specific scientific topics)
 * Volume 1 (2014, 4 issues):
 * The Big Questions
 * The Unknown Universe
 * Guide to a Better You
 * The Human Story
 * Volume 2 (2015, 5 issues):
 * The Human Brain
 * Medical Frontiers
 * Being Human
 * Our Planet
 * 15 Ideas you Need to Understand
 * Volume 3 (2016, 5 issues):
 * The Wonders of Space
 * Life: Origin, Evolution, Extinction
 * The Quantum World
 * Wild Planet
 * Mind-Expanding Ideas
 * Volume 4 (2017, 4 issues):
 * Einstein's Mind-Bending Universe
 * The Scientific Guide to an Even Better You
 * Essential Knowledge
 * Infinity and Beyond
 * Second Edition (2018–2019):
 * Big Questions Big Answers (2nd Edition of "The Big Questions")
 * 21 Great Mysteries of the Universe (2nd Edition of "The Unknown Universe")
 * Civilisation
 * Becoming Human (2nd Edition of "The Human Story")
 * The Essential Guide to Earth (2nd Edition of "Our Planet")
 * Souvenir Issue: The Quest for Space
 * Being Human
 * 17 More Things You Need to Understand
 * Mysteries of the Human Brain
 * New Scientist: Essential Guides (2020–2023)
 * The Nature of Reality
 * Artificial Intelligence
 * Human Health
 * Our Human Story
 * Quantum Physics
 * Evolution
 * The Human Brain
 * Climate Change
 * Nutrition and Diet
 * Einstein's Universe
 * Life on Earth
 * Consciousness
 * The Solar System
 * Human Society
 * Particle Physics
 * Exercise
 * Planet Earth
 * Ageing
 * Time
 * The Human Mind
 * The Dawn of Civilisation
 * Space Exploration

New Scientist has also worked with other publishers to produce books based on the magazine's content:

 * 1992 Inside Science, edited by Richard Fifield, published by Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-014570-0
 * 1992 The New Scientist Guide to Chaos, edited by Nina Hall, published by Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-014571-7

In 2012 Arc, "a new digital quarterly from the makers of New Scientist, exploring the future through the world of science fiction" and fact was launched. In the same year the magazine launched a dating service, NewScientistConnect, operated by The Dating Lab.

Since 2016 New Scientist has held an annual science festival in London. Styled New Scientist Live, the event has attracted high-profile scientists and science presenters.

Greg Egan's criticism of the EmDrive article
In September 2006, New Scientist was criticised by science fiction writer Greg Egan, who wrote that "a sensationalist bent and a lack of basic knowledge by its writers" was making the magazine's coverage sufficiently unreliable "to constitute a real threat to the public understanding of science". In particular, Egan found himself "gobsmacked by the level of scientific illiteracy" in the magazine's coverage of Roger Shawyer's "electromagnetic drive", where New Scientist allowed the publication of "meaningless double-talk" designed to bypass a fatal objection to Shawyer's proposed space drive, namely that it violates the law of conservation of momentum. Egan urged others to write to New Scientist and pressure the magazine to raise its standards, instead of "squandering the opportunity that the magazine's circulation and prestige provides". The editor of New Scientist, then Jeremy Webb, replied defending the article, saying that it is "an ideas magazine—that means writing about hypotheses as well as theories".

"Darwin was wrong" cover
In January 2009, New Scientist ran a cover with the title "Darwin was wrong". The actual story stated that specific details of Darwin's evolution theory had been shown incorrectly, mainly the shape of phylogenetic trees of interrelated species, which should be represented as a web instead of a tree. Some evolutionary biologists who actively oppose the intelligent design movement thought the cover was both sensationalist and damaging to the scientific community.

title: New Scientist


text:
Stephen Cook

Stephen Arthur Cook (born December 14, 1939) is an American-Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who has made significant contributions to the fields of complexity theory and proof complexity. He is a university professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science and Department of Mathematics.

He is considered one of the forefathers of computational complexity theory.

Biography
Cook received his bachelor's degree in 1961 from the University of Michigan, and his master's degree and PhD from Harvard University, respectively in 1962 and 1966, from the Mathematics Department. He joined the University of California, Berkeley, mathematics department in 1966 as an assistant professor, and stayed there until 1970 when he was denied reappointment. In a speech celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Berkeley electrical engineering and computer sciences department, fellow Turing Award winner and Berkeley professor Richard Karp said that, "It is to our everlasting shame that we were unable to persuade the math department to give him tenure." Cook joined the faculty of the University of Toronto, Computer Science and Mathematics Departments in 1970 as an associate professor, where he was promoted to professor in 1975 and Distinguished Professor in 1985.

Research
During his PhD, Cook worked on complexity of functions, mainly on multiplication. In his seminal 1971 paper "The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures", Cook formalized the notions of polynomial-time reduction (also known as Cook reduction) and NP-completeness, and proved the existence of an NP-complete problem by showing that the Boolean satisfiability problem (usually known as SAT) is NP-complete. This theorem was proven independently by Leonid Levin in the Soviet Union, and has thus been given the name the Cook–Levin theorem. The paper also formulated the most famous problem in computer science, the P vs. NP problem. Informally, the "P vs. NP" question asks whether every optimization problem whose answers can be efficiently verified for correctness/optimality can be solved optimally with an efficient algorithm. Given the abundance of such optimization problems in everyday life, a positive answer to the "P vs. NP" question would likely have profound practical and philosophical consequences.

Cook conjectures that there are optimization problems (with easily checkable solutions) that cannot be solved by efficient algorithms, i.e., P is not equal to NP. This conjecture has generated a great deal of research in computational complexity theory, which has considerably improved our understanding of the inherent difficulty of computational problems and what can be computed efficiently. Yet, the conjecture remains open and is among the seven famous Millennium Prize Problems.

In 1982, Cook received the Turing Award for his contributions to complexity theory. His citation reads:

"For his advancement of our understanding of the complexity of computation in a significant and profound way. His seminal paper, The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures, presented at the 1971 ACM SIGACT Symposium on the Theory of Computing, laid the foundations for the theory of NP-Completeness. The ensuing exploration of the boundaries and nature of NP-complete class of problems has been one of the most active and important research activities in computer science for the last decade."

In his "Feasibly Constructive Proofs and the Propositional Calculus" paper published in 1975, he introduced the equational theory PV (standing for Polynomial-time Verifiable) to formalize the notion of proofs using only polynomial-time concepts. He made another major contribution to the field in his 1979 paper, joint with his student Robert A. Reckhow, "The Relative Efficiency of Propositional Proof Systems", in which they formalized the notions of p-simulation and efficient propositional proof system, which started an area now called propositional proof complexity. They proved that the existence of a proof system in which every true formula has a short proof is equivalent to NP = coNP. Cook co-authored a book with his student Phuong The Nguyen in this area titled "Logical Foundations of Proof Complexity".

His main research areas are complexity theory and proof complexity, with excursions into programming language semantics, parallel computation, and artificial intelligence. Other areas that he has contributed to include bounded arithmetic, bounded reverse mathematics, complexity of higher type functions, complexity of analysis, and lower bounds in propositional proof systems.

Some other contributions
He named the complexity class NC after Nick Pippenger. The complexity class SC is named after him. The definition of the complexity class AC0 and its hierarchy AC are also introduced by him.

According to Don Knuth the KMP algorithm was inspired by Cook's automata for recognizing concatenated palindromes in linear time.

Awards and honors
Cook was awarded an NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship in 1977, a Killam Research Fellowship in 1982, and received the CRM-Fields-PIMS prize in 1999. He has won John L. Synge Award and Bernard Bolzano Medal of the Czech Academy of Sciences (2008), and is a fellow of the Royal Society of London and Royal Society of Canada. Cook was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences (United States) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Cook won the ACM Turing Award in 1982. Association for Computing Machinery honored him as a Fellow of ACM in 2008 for his fundamental contributions to the theory of computational complexity. He was selected by the Association for Symbolic Logic to give the Gödel Lecture in 1999.

The Government of Ontario appointed him to the Order of Ontario in 2013, the highest honor in Ontario. He has won the 2012 Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering, the highest honor for scientists and engineers in Canada. The Herzberg Medal is awarded by NSERC for "both the sustained excellence and overall influence of research work conducted in Canada in the natural sciences or engineering". He was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2015.

Cook was granted the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award 2015 in the Information and Communication Technologies category "for his important role in identifying what computers can and cannot solve efficiently," in the words of the jury's citation. His work, it continues, "has had a dramatic impact in all fields where complex computations are crucial."

Cook has supervised numerous MSc students, and 36 PhD students have completed their degrees under his supervision.

Personal life
Cook lives with his wife in Toronto. They have two sons, one of whom is Olympic sailor Gordon Cook.

title: Stephen Cook


text:
Tony Hoare

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare, also known as Tony Hoare or by his initials C. A. R. Hoare (born 11 January 1934) is a British computer scientist who has made foundational contributions to programming languages, algorithms, operating systems, formal verification, and concurrent computing. His work earned him the Turing Award, usually regarded as the highest distinction in computer science, in 1980.

Hoare developed the sorting algorithm quicksort in 1959–1960. He developed Hoare logic, an axiomatic basis for verifying program correctness. In the semantics of concurrency, he introduced the formal language communicating sequential processes (CSP) to specify the interactions of concurrent processes, and along with Edsger Dijkstra, formulated the dining philosophers problem. Since 1977, he has held positions at the University of Oxford and Microsoft Research in Cambridge.

Education and early life
Tony Hoare was born in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to British parents; his father was a colonial civil servant and his mother was the daughter of a tea planter. Hoare was educated in England at the Dragon School in Oxford and the King's School in Canterbury. He then studied Classics and Philosophy ("Greats") at Merton College, Oxford. On graduating in 1956 he did 18 months National Service in the Royal Navy, where he learned Russian. He returned to the University of Oxford in 1958 to study for a postgraduate certificate in statistics, and it was here that he began computer programming, having been taught Autocode on the Ferranti Mercury by Leslie Fox. He then went to Moscow State University as a British Council exchange student, where he studied machine translation under Andrey Kolmogorov.

Research and career
In 1960, Hoare left the Soviet Union and began working at Elliott Brothers Ltd, a small computer manufacturing firm located in London. There, he implemented the language ALGOL 60 and began developing major algorithms.

He was involved with developing international standards in programming and informatics, as a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which specified, maintains, and supports the languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.

He became the Professor of Computing Science at the Queen's University of Belfast in 1968, and in 1977 returned to Oxford as the Professor of Computing to lead the Programming Research Group in the Oxford University Computing Laboratory (now Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford), following the death of Christopher Strachey. He became the first Christopher Strachey Professor of Computing on its establishment in 1988 until his retirement at Oxford in 2000. He is now an Emeritus Professor there, and is also a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England.

Hoare's most significant work has been in the following areas: his sorting and selection algorithm (Quicksort and Quickselect), Hoare logic, the formal language communicating sequential processes (CSP) used to specify the interactions between concurrent processes (and implemented in various programming languages such as occam), structuring computer operating systems using the monitor concept, and the axiomatic specification of programming languages.

Speaking at a software conference in 2009, Tony Hoare hyperbolically apologized for "inventing" the null reference: "I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W). My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years."

For many years under his leadership, Hoare's Oxford department worked on formal specification languages such as CSP and Z. These did not achieve the expected take-up by industry, and in 1995 Hoare was led to reflect upon the original assumptions: "Ten years ago, researchers into formal methods (and I was the most mistaken among them) predicted that the programming world would embrace with gratitude every assistance promised by formalisation to solve the problems of reliability that arise when programs get large and more safety-critical. Programs have now got very large and very critical – well beyond the scale which can be comfortably tackled by formal methods. There have been many problems and failures, but these have nearly always been attributable to inadequate analysis of requirements or inadequate management control. It has turned out that the world just does not suffer significantly from the kind of problem that our research was originally intended to solve." A commemorative article was written in tribute to Hoare on his 90th birthday.

Awards and honours

 * ACM Programming Systems and Languages Paper Award (1973) for the paper "Proof of correctness of data representations"
 * Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society (1978)
 * Turing Award for "fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages". The award was presented to him at the ACM Annual Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, on 27 October 1980, by Walter Carlson, chairman of the Awards committee. A transcript of Hoare's speech was published in Communications of the ACM.
 * Harry H. Goode Memorial Award (1981)
 * Fellow of the Royal Society (1982)
 * Honorary Doctorate of Science by the Queen's University Belfast (1987)
 * Honorary Doctorate of Science, from the University of Bath (1993)
 * Honorary Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford (1998)
 * Knighted for services to education and computer science (2000)
 * Kyoto Prize for Information science (2000)
 * Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2005)
 * Member of the National Academy of Engineering (2006) for fundamental contributions to computer science in the areas of algorithms, operating systems, and programming languages.
 * Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California Fellow of the Museum "for development of the Quicksort algorithm and for lifelong contributions to the theory of programming languages" (2006)
 * Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University (2007)
 * Honorary Doctorate of Science from the Department of Informatics of the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) (2007)
 * Friedrich L. Bauer-Prize, Technical University of Munich (2007)
 * SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award (2011)
 * IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2011)
 * Honorary Doctorate, University of Warsaw (2012)
 * Honorary Doctorate, Complutense University of Madrid (2013)
 * Royal Medal of the Royal Society (2023)

Personal life
In 1962, Hoare married Jill Pym, a member of his research team.

Books

 * C. A. R. Hoare (1985). Communicating Sequential Processes. Prentice Hall International Series in Computer Science. ISBN 978-0131532717 (hardback) or ISBN 978-0131532892 (paperback). (Available online at http://www.usingcsp.com/ in PDF format.)
 * C. A. R. Hoare (1985). Communicating Sequential Processes. Prentice Hall International Series in Computer Science. ISBN 978-0131532717 (hardback) or ISBN 978-0131532892 (paperback). (Available online at http://www.usingcsp.com/ in PDF format.)

title: Tony Hoare


text:
Anahuac (Aztec)

Anahuac is the ancient core of Mexico. Anahuac is a Nahuatl name which means "close to water." It can be broken down like this: A(tl) + nahuac. Atl means "water" and nahuac, which is a relational word that can be affixed to a noun, means "close to." Anahuac is sometimes used interchangeably with "Valley of Mexico", but Anahuac properly designates the south-central part of the 8000 sqkm valley, where well-developed pre-Hispanic culture traits had created distinctive landscapes now hidden by the urban sprawl of Mexico City. In the sense of modern geomorphological terminology, "Valley of Mexico" is misnamed.

Boundaries
According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, Anáhuac (sic) is "limited by the traditional and vaguely defined boundaries of an ancient American empire or confederation of that name previous to the Spanish conquest."

"The word is said to signify 'country by the waters' in Nahuatl, the old Aztec language; hence the theory that Anahuac was located on the sea coast. One of the theories relating to the location of Anahuac describes it as all the plateau region of Mexico, with an area equal to three-fourths of the republic, and extending between the eastern and western coast ranges from Rio Grande to the isthmus of Tehuantepec. A more exact and more commonly used description, however, limits it to the great plateau valley in which the city of Mexico is located, between 18°40' and 20°30'N latitude, about 320 km long by 120 km wide, with an average elevation of 2300 meters (7500 feet), and a mean temperature of 17°C (62°F).  The accepted meaning of the name fits this region as well as any on the sea coast, as the lakes of this valley formerly covered one-tenth of its area.  The existence of the name in southern Utah, United States, and on the gulf coast of Mexico, has given rise to theories of other locations and wider bounds for the old Indian empire."

One of the possible etymologies proposed for the name "Nicaragua" is that it is derived from any of the following Nahuatl words: nic-anahuac, which meant "Anahuac reached this far", or "the Nahuas came this far", or "those who come from Anahuac came this far"; nican-nahua, which meant "here are the Nahuas"; or nic-atl-nahuac, which meant "here by the water" or "surrounded by water". The first two explanations would have a bearing on the above issue of the borders.

title: Anahuac (Aztec)