The topic that i chose to study a little about in the encyclopedia was mathematics. the reason is i have always loved math and i am currently taking two economics classes that are heavy on the math, one in calculus and one in statistics. So I looked at all four of the entries under Mathematics and found the most interesting one to be about limits. Limits for those of you who dont know are used in calculus and it is defined as x+h as h approaches some defined number or line or plane. this all i knew, but what i thought was really cool was that the entry taught me that the principles of the limit are "used as principles to show rigorously that the area of a circle, is the product of its semicircumference by its radius." i have always just taken that equation for granted and never really stopped to see where it came from. but now i think: 'of course it comes by using limits, duh!'. it is cool when things you learned a long time ago and things you are learning come together like that. this was a simple epiphany that has relatively little importance however i still thought i would share it.
I had a similar experience with my classes the other day. We were discussing in my political science class the differences in the governments of Europe with that of the United States. It turns out the European governments have more open social democracies. This was the same day we talked about open source software as a model for governments.
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