The World Public Library Department of Education Library: Online Educational Resource Collection supports teachers, students, and parents in meeting their educational challenges. The Online Educational Resource Collection contains reports, worksheets, studies, articles, eBooks, and a variety of other publications that support and strengthen the learning experience.
Description: Mark Twain's work on Joan of Arc is titled in full Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte who is identified further as Joan's page and secretary. The work is fictionally presented as a translation from the manuscript by Jean Francois Alden, or, in the words of the published book, Freely Translated out of the Ancient French into Modern English from the Original Unpublished Manuscript in the National Archives of France. De Conte is ...
Description: Roughing It follows the travels of young Mark Twain through the Wild West during the years 1861–1867. After a brief stint as a Confederate cavalry militiaman, he joined his brother Orion Clemens, who had been appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory, on a stagecoach journey west. Twain consulted his brother's diary to refresh his memory and borrowed heavily from his active imagination for many stories in the novel. Roughing It illustrates many of Twain's ...
Description: Edmond Halley,(1656–1742) was an English astronomer, geophysicist, mathematician, meteorologist, and physicist who is best known for computing the orbit of the eponymous Halley's Comet. He was the second Astronomer Royal in Britain, following in the footsteps of John Flamsteed. Halley became a close friend of Isaac Newton. He encouraged Newton to publish his discoveries, his Principia, but when the Royal Society had no money to pay for the publication, Halle...
Description: James Bradley (1693–1762) was the English astronomer who served as Astronomer Royal from 1742, succeeding Edmund Halley. He is best known for two fundamental discoveries in astronomy, the aberration of light (1725–1728), and the nutation of the Earth's axis (1728–1748). These discoveries were called the most brilliant and useful of the century by Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre, historian of astronomy, mathematical astronomer and director of the Paris Observat...
Description: John Flamsteed (1646-1719) was an English astronomer, a contemporary of Isaac Newton, and the first Astronomer Royal in charge of the newly built observatory at Greenwich, England (1676). Although he made no great discoveries nor new astronomical theories, Flamsteed distinguished himself by his meticulous measurements of the positions of stars, as Tycho Brahe did with observations of the planets. He also made improvements to astronomical techniques and some ...
Description: Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827), was a French mathematician and astronomer, sometimes referred to as the French Newton. His work was pivotal to the mathematical development of astronomy, physics, and statistics. He possessed a phenomenal mathematical ability, superior to that of any of his contemporaries. Laplace summarized and extended the work of his predecessors in his five-volume Mécanique Céleste (Celestial Mechanics) (1799–1825). This work...
Description: Sir Frederick William Herschel, (Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel) (1738–1822) was a German-born British astronomer, telescope maker, and composer. He became famous for the first discovery of a planet not visible to the naked eye, the planet Uranus, and two of its major moons (Titania and Oberon), and two moons of Saturn. He was the first person to discover infrared radiation. Herschel's first profession was composing and performing music, with astronomy being his...
Description: William Parsons, the 3rd Earl of Rosse, (1800–1867) was an Anglo-Irish astronomer who made several large telescopes. His 72-inch telescope, the Leviathan, built in 1845, was the world's largest telescope until the early 20th century. The 72-inch (1.8 m) telescope replaced a 36-inch (910 mm) telescope that he had built previously. He had to invent many of the techniques he used for constructing the Leviathan, both because its size was without precedent and be...
Description: Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865) was an Irish physicist, astronomer, and mathematician who made important contributions to mechanics, optics, and algebra. As a teenager, he mastered parts of Newton's Principia and studied Laplace's celestial mechanics treatise. When barely 22, Hamilton became a professor of astronomy at University of Dublin, however he was more interested in theoretical rather than practical astronomy. His studies of mechanical and opt...
Description: Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism, which held that the Earth is not the center of the universe and that the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun. Galileo has been called the father of modern observational astronomy,...
Description: Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1726) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist and theologian who has been considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived. His monograph Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, laid the foundations for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the s...
Description: Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was a mathematician and astronomer who formulated a comprehensive heliocentric model which placed the Sun, rather than the Earth, at the center of the universe, contrary to the prevailing thought at his time which placed the Earth at the center. The publication of Copernicus' book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), just before his death in 1543, is considered a major event in th...
Description: This is the chapter on 16th century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe from Sir Robert S. Ball's Great Astronomers, second edition, which begins: The most picturesque figure in the history of astronomy ... Tycho Brahe was alike notable for his astronomical genius and for the extraordinary vehemence of a character which was by no means perfect. His romantic career as a philosopher, and his taste for splendour as a Danish noble, his ardent friendships and his furio...
Description: Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software is a free book licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It is a biography of Richard Stallman, an American software freedom activist and computer programmer. In 1983 he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and in Ocober 1985 he created the Free Software Foundation. (Source: Wikipedia)
Description: The diary of a World War One U-Boat commander. As well as being a fascinating glimpse of life on the German U-boats during the intense submarine blockade, this also reminds us there were humans involved - on both sides of the action - as we read too of the intimate thoughts and intense love of a man longing for his sweetheart.