Minima naturalia
Minima naturalia ("natural minima") were theorized by Aristotle as the smallest parts into which a homogeneous natural substance (e.g., flesh, bone, or wood) could be divided and still retain its essential character. In this context, "nature" means formal nature. Thus, "natural minimum" may be taken to mean "formal minimum": the minimum amount of matter necessary to instantiate a certain form.
Speculation on minima naturalia in late Antiquity, in the Islamic world, and by Scholastic and Renaissance thinkers in Europe provided a conceptual bridge between the atomism of ancient Greece and the mechanistic philosophy of early modern thinkers like Descartes, which in turn provided a background for the rigorously mathematical and experimental atomism of modern science.
Aristotle's initial suggestion
According to Aristotle, the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaxagoras had taught that every thing, and every portion of a thing, contains within itself an infinite number of like and unlike parts. For example, Anaxagoras maintained that there must be blackness as well as whiteness in snow; how, otherwise, could it be turned into dark water? Aristotle criticized Anaxagoras' theory on multiple grounds, among them the following:
Minima!
Minima! is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Machiko Sakurai. It was cancelled in February 2008.
Manga
The manga was licensed for an English-language release in North America by Del Rey Manga. As of February 2009, Del Rey Manga had released 4 bound volumes of the manga.
Volume list
Reception
Mania.com's Nadia Oxford and About.com's Deb Aoki comments on the manga's realistic portrayal of a high school girl who is a victim of bullying. Pop Culture Shock's Katherine Dacey criticises the manga artist's artwork saying that Sakurai "has a limited repertoire of character designs, and a tendency to draw vaguely alien faces with bulging eyes and foreheads." Casey Brienza at Anime News Network commends the manga's ability to seamlessly "shift from human-sized perspectives to toy-sized ones and back again".
References
External links
Maxima and minima
In mathematical analysis, the maxima and minima (the plural of maximum and minimum) of a function, known collectively as extrema (the plural of extremum), are the largest and smallest value of the function, either within a given range (the local or relative extrema) or on the entire domain of a function (the global or absolute extrema).Pierre de Fermat was one of the first mathematicians to propose a general technique, adequality, for finding the maxima and minima of functions.
As defined in set theory, the maximum and minimum of a set are the greatest and least elements in the set, respectively. Unbounded infinite sets, such as the set of real numbers, have no minimum or maximum.
Definition
A real-valued function f defined on a domain X has a global (or absolute) maximum point at x∗ if f(x∗) ≥ f(x) for all x in X. Similarly, the function has a global (or absolute) minimum point at x∗ if f(x∗) ≤ f(x) for all x in X. The value of the function at a maximum point is called the maximum value of the function and the value of the function at a minimum point is called the minimum value of the function.
VEB Typoart
VEB Typoart was the only type foundry of East Germany. It was a state-owned enterprise ("Volkseigener Betrieb") located in Dresden. The foundry's most influential art directors were Herbert Thannhäuser and Albert Kapr.
History
VEB Typoart was created by the government of the German Democratic Republic in 1948 through a merger of several nationalised type foundries, including Schelter & Giesecke (1945) and Ludwig Wagner AG (1960). It was subordinated to Zentrag, a state enterprise coordinating all GDR printing activity. Typoart's principal mission was to create typefaces for Eastern Germany and other Eastern Bloc countries. It was frequently ordered to plagiarise Western typefaces that Zentrag could not afford to license.
In the course of German reunification, Typoart was privatised as Typoart GmbH in 1989 and went bankrupt in 1995. The copyright status of its typefaces remained uncertain, and some of them have been reissued in digital form by other type foundries.
Typefaces
Typoart's typefaces included:
Podcasts:
