Genius of Britain

Genius of Britain is a five-part television documentary presented by leading British scientific figures, such as Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, James Dyson, David Attenborough, Robert Winston, Paul Nurse, Jim Al-Khalili, Kathy Sykes and Olivia Judson. The series charts the history of some of Britain's most important scientists and innovators.

It was first broadcast on Channel 4 on 30 May 2010.

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Genius

A genius is a person who displays exceptional intellectual ability or originality, typically to a degree that is associated with the achievement of new advances in a domain of knowledge. Despite the presence of scholars in many subjects in history, many geniuses have shown high achievements only in a single subject, unlike the talented people. There is no scientifically precise definition of genius, and the question of whether the notion itself has any real meaning has long been a subject of debate, although psychologists are converging on a definition that emphasizes creativity and eminent achievement.

Etymology

In ancient Rome, the genius (plural in Latin genii) was the guiding spirit or tutelary deity of a person, family (gens), or place (genius loci). The noun is related to the Latin verb genui, genitus, "to bring into being, create, produce". Because the achievements of exceptional individuals seemed to indicate the presence of a particularly powerful genius, by the time of Augustus the word began to acquire its secondary meaning of "inspiration, talent". The term genius acquired its modern sense in the eighteenth century, and is a conflation of two Latin terms: genius, as above, and ingenium, a related noun referring to our innate dispositions, talents and inborn nature. Beginning to blend the concepts of the divine and the talented, the Encyclopédie article on genius (génie) describes such a person as "he whose soul is more expansive and struck by the feelings of all others; interested by all that is in nature never to receive an idea unless it evokes a feeling; everything excites him and on which nothing is lost."

Genius (mathematics software)

Genius (also known as the Genius Math Tool) is a free open source numerical computing environment and programming language, similar in some aspects to MATLAB, GNU Octave, Mathematica and Maple. Genius is aimed at mathematical experimentation rather than computation intensive tasks. It is also very useful as just a calculator. The programming language is called GEL and aims to have a mathematically friendly syntax. The software comes with a command line and a GUI interface which uses the GTK+ libraries. The graphical version supports both 2D and 3D plotting. The graphical version includes a set of tutorials originally aimed at in class demonstrations.

History

Genius was the original calculator for the GNOME project started in 1997, but was split into a separate project soon after the 0.13 release of GNOME in 1998. Because of this ancestry, it was also known as Genius Calculator or GNOME Genius. There was an attempt to merge Genius and the Dr. Geo interactive geometry software, but this merge never materialized. Version 1.0 was released in 2007 almost 10 years after the initial release.

Genius (flashcard software)

Genius is a free program that helps users memorize information.

Overview

Users can create lists of items to study, which include a 'Question' and an 'Answer' for each item. Genius organizes the information and tests the user using an intelligent spaced repetition method that's based on past performance.

The first time an item is shown both the question and the answer is shown. Each subsequent time only one is shown and the user is prompted to type the other into a text area. If the user answers adequately, the program moves on to the next item; otherwise it shows what was typed incorrectly.

Each study session goes through a fraction of the items on a long list, and often many study sessions are needed to cover every item.

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