Newest Portraits

On February 1, 1946, reporters were given the opportunity to observe the first public trial of a new device that promised to do the work of a year in a week. It was called ENIAC, the world’s first electronic computer, and the somewhat befuddled newsmen had it explained to them as the brainchild of John Mauchly (1907-1980) and J. Presper Eckert (1919-1995), but what they weren’t told was that the only reason it was functioning at all for them on that day was due to the program

In early 19th century Bengal, to find yourself pregnant was to see stretching before you nine of the most agonizing months of your existence. Considered Unclean by social practice, you were removed to the most isolated room within the house (the sutikagriha) if you were lucky, or to a dismal outbuilding if you weren’t, where all openings to the outside world were sealed shut, and a fire was set to burning so that the room was permanently excruciatingly hot, dark, and filled w

In secondary school, matrices don’t get anything near a fair shake. In case it has been a while, matrices were those rectangular grids of numbers that look something like this: In most secondary schools, you learn in your sophomore year the rules for adding them together, multiplying them, and for using them to represent systems of equations (the above matrix, for example, could represent the system 5x + 2y = 3, 1x + 4y = -2), and that is basically it. Throughout all of cal

In 1956, the All India Institutes of Medical Science, or AIIMS, was established thanks to the efforts of Health Minister Amrit Kaur to create a center that would serve a crucial triple purpose - not only to heal the sick, but to allow research to be carried out on the diseases unique to the Indian subcontinent, and most importantly, to train the medical personnel needed to bring a high standard of medical care to those remote regions of the nation that had effectively no mode

On April 10, 1862, Union brigadier general Quincy Gillmore asked for the surrender of the Confederate stronghold, Fort Pulaski. When they refused, he used his newly arrived rifled cannons to decimate the stone wall of the fort, causing its quick surrender, and changing the local momentum of the war in the process. One of the great unspoken consequences of this victory was that it convinced the uncle of a fourteen year old girl named Susan Ann Baker (1848-1912) to leave the pl