Computer graphics are pictures and films created using computers. The term refers to computer-generated image data created with the help of specialized graphical hardware and software, it is a vast and developed area of computer science. The phrase was coined in 1960, by computer graphics researchers Verne Hudson and William Fetter of Boeing, it is abbreviated as CG, though sometimes erroneously referred to as computer-generated imagery. Some topics in computer graphics include user interface design, sprite graphics, vector graphics, 3D modeling, shaders, GPU design, implicit surface visualization with ray tracing, computer vision, among others; the overall methodology depends on the underlying sciences of geometry and physics. Computer graphics is responsible for displaying art and image data and meaningfully to the consumer, it is used for processing image data received from the physical world. Computer graphics development has had a significant impact on many types of media and has revolutionized animation, advertising, video games, graphic design in general.
The term computer graphics has been used in a broad sense to describe "almost everything on computers, not text or sound". The term computer graphics refers to several different things: the representation and manipulation of image data by a computer the various technologies used to create and manipulate images the sub-field of computer science which studies methods for digitally synthesizing and manipulating visual content, see study of computer graphicsToday, computer graphics is widespread; such imagery is found in and on television, weather reports, in a variety of medical investigations and surgical procedures. A well-constructed graph can present complex statistics in a form, easier to understand and interpret. In the media "such graphs are used to illustrate papers, theses", other presentation material. Many tools have been developed to visualize data. Computer generated imagery can be categorized into several different types: two dimensional, three dimensional, animated graphics; as technology has improved, 3D computer graphics have become more common, but 2D computer graphics are still used.
Computer graphics has emerged as a sub-field of computer science which studies methods for digitally synthesizing and manipulating visual content. Over the past decade, other specialized fields have been developed like information visualization, scientific visualization more concerned with "the visualization of three dimensional phenomena, where the emphasis is on realistic renderings of volumes, illumination sources, so forth with a dynamic component"; the precursor sciences to the development of modern computer graphics were the advances in electrical engineering and television that took place during the first half of the twentieth century. Screens could display art since the Lumiere brothers' use of mattes to create special effects for the earliest films dating from 1895, but such displays were limited and not interactive; the first cathode ray tube, the Braun tube, was invented in 1897 – it in turn would permit the oscilloscope and the military control panel – the more direct precursors of the field, as they provided the first two-dimensional electronic displays that responded to programmatic or user input.
Computer graphics remained unknown as a discipline until the 1950s and the post-World War II period – during which time the discipline emerged from a combination of both pure university and laboratory academic research into more advanced computers and the United States military's further development of technologies like radar, advanced aviation, rocketry developed during the war. New kinds of displays were needed to process the wealth of information resulting from such projects, leading to the development of computer graphics as a discipline. Early projects like the Whirlwind and SAGE Projects introduced the CRT as a viable display and interaction interface and introduced the light pen as an input device. Douglas T. Ross of the Whirlwind SAGE system performed a personal experiment in which a small program he wrote captured the movement of his finger and displayed its vector on a display scope. One of the first interactive video games to feature recognizable, interactive graphics – Tennis for Two – was created for an oscilloscope by William Higinbotham to entertain visitors in 1958 at Brookhaven National Laboratory and simulated a tennis match.
In 1959, Douglas T. Ross innovated again while working at MIT on transforming mathematic statements into computer generated 3D machine tool vectors by taking the opportunity to create a display scope image of a Disney cartoon character. Electronics pioneer Hewlett-Packard went public in 1957 after incorporating the decade prior, established strong ties with Stanford University through its founders, who were alumni; this began the decades-long transformation of the southern San Francisco Bay Area into the world's leading computer technology hub - now known as Silicon Valley. The field of computer graphics developed with the emergence of computer graphics hardware. Further advances in computing led to greater advancements in interactive computer graphics. In 1959, the TX-2 computer was developed at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory; the TX-2 integrated a number of new man-machine interfaces. A light pen could be used to draw sketches on the computer using Ivan Sutherland's revolutionary Sketchpad software.
Using a light pen, Sketchpad allowed one to draw simple shapes on the computer screen, save them and recall them later. The light pen itself had a small photoelectric cell in its tip. T
James Arthur Gosling, OC is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the founder and lead designer behind the Java programming language. James Gosling received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Calgary and his M. A. and Ph. D. from Carnegie Mellon University, all in computer science. He wrote, he built a multi-processor version of Unix for a 16-way computer system while at Carnegie Mellon University, before joining Sun Microsystems. He developed several compilers and mail systems there. Gosling was with Sun Microsystems between 1984 and 2010, he is known as the father of the Java programming language. He got the idea for the Java VM while writing a program to port software from a PERQ by translating Perq Q-Code to VAX assembler and emulating the hardware, he left Sun Microsystems on April 2, 2010 after it was acquired by the Oracle Corporation, citing reductions in pay and decision-making ability, along with change of role and ethical challenges. He has since taken a critical stance towards Oracle in interviews, noting that "during the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle, where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle."
He clarified his position during the Oracle v Google trial over Android: "While I have differences with Oracle, in this case, they are on the right. Google slimed Sun. We were all disturbed Jonathan Schwartz. However, he approved of the court's ruling. In March 2011, Gosling left Oracle to work at Google. Six months he followed his colleague Bill Vass and joined a startup called Liquid Robotics. In late 2016, Liquid Robotics was acquired by Boeing. Following the acquisition, Gosling left Liquid Robotics to work at Amazon Web Services as Distinguished Engineer in May 2017, he is an adviser at the Scala company Lightbend, Independent Director at Jelastic, Strategic Advisor for Eucalyptus, is a board member of DIRTT Environmental Solutions. He is known for his love of proving "the unknown" and has noted that his favorite irrational number is √2, he has a framed picture of the first 1,000 digits of √2 in his office. Gosling became known as the author of Gosling Emacs, invented the windowing system NeWS, which lost out to X Window because Sun did not give it an open source license.
He is credited with having invented the Java programming language in 1994. He created the original design of Java and implemented the language's original compiler and virtual machine. Gosling traces the origins of the approach to his early graduate-student days, when he created a p-code virtual machine for the lab's DEC VAX computer, so that his professor could run programs written in UCSD Pascal. In the work leading to Java at Sun, he saw that architecture-neutral execution for distributed programs could be achieved by implementing a similar philosophy: always program for the same virtual machine. For his achievement, the National Academy of Engineering in the United States elected him as a Foreign Associate member. Another contribution of Gosling's was co-writing the "bundle" program, a utility detailed in Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike's book The Unix Programming Environment. 2002: he was awarded The Economist Innovation Award. 2002: he was awarded The Flame Award USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award.
2007: he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. The Order is Canada's second highest civilian honor. Officers are the second highest grade within the Order. 2013: he became a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. 2015: awarded IEEE John von Neumann Medal Ken Arnold, James Gosling, David Holmes, The Java Programming Language, Fourth Edition, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2005, ISBN 0-321-34980-6 James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy L. Steele Jr. Gilad Bracha, The Java Language Specification, Third Edition, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2005, ISBN 0-321-24678-0 Ken Arnold, James Gosling, David Holmes, The Java Programming Language, Third Edition, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2000, ISBN 0-201-70433-1 James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy L. Steele Jr. Gilad Bracha, The Java Language Specification, Second Edition, Addison-Wesley, 2000, ISBN 0-201-31008-2 Gregory Bollella, Benjamin Brosgol, James Gosling, Peter Dibble, Steve Furr, David Hardin, Mark Turnbull, The Real-Time Specification for Java, Addison Wesley Longman, 2000, ISBN 0-201-70323-8 Ken Arnold, James Gosling, The Java programming language Second Edition, Addison-Wesley, 1997, ISBN 0-201-31006-6 Ken Arnold, James Gosling, The Java programming language, Addison-Wesley, 1996, ISBN 0-201-63455-4 James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy L. Steele Jr.
The Java Language Specification, Addison Wesley Publishing Company, 1996, ISBN 0-201-63451-1 James Gosling, Frank Yellin, The Java Team, The Java Application Programming Interface, Volume 2: Window Toolkit and Applets, Addison-Wesley, 1996, ISBN 0-201-63459-7 James Gosling, Frank Yellin, The Java Team, The Java Application Programming Interface, Volume 1: Core Packages, Addison-Wesley, 1996, ISBN 0-201-63453-8 James Gosling, Henry McGilton, The Java language Environment: A white paper, Sun Microsystems, 1996 James Gosling, David S. H. Rosenthal, Michelle J. Arden, The NeWS Book: An Introduction to the Network/Extensible Window System, Springer, 1989, ISBN 0-387-96915-2 History of Java Fallacies of distributed computing James Gosling's personal weblog Presentation by James Gosling about the origins of Java, from the JVM Languages Summit 2008 Slide show depicting Gosling's life The Process of Innovation – James
Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation
The Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation was founded by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, it was incorporated on December 22, 1947. After building the ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania and Mauchly formed EMCC to build new computer designs for commercial and military applications; the company was called the Electronic Control Company, changing its name to Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation when it was incorporated. In 1950, the company was sold to Remington Rand, which merged with Sperry Corporation to become Sperry Rand, survives today as Unisys. Before founding Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, Mauchly researched the computing needs of potential clients. Over a period of six months in 1944 he kept detailed notes of his conversations. For instance, Mauchly met with United States Census Bureau official William Madow to discuss the computing equipment they desired; the Census Bureau was keen on reducing the number of punch cards it had to manage with each census. This meeting led to Madow making a trip to see ENIAC in person.
Mauchly met with Lt. Colonel Solomon Kullback, an official at the Army Signal Corps, to discuss codes and ciphers. Kullback said there was a need for many "more flexible" computers at his agency. Mauchly responded by analyzing EDVAC's potential encryption and decryption abilities. Eckert and Mauchly thus believed. By the spring of 1946, Eckert and Mauchly had procured a U. S. Army contract for the University of Pennsylvania and were designing the EDVAC – the successor machine to the ENIAC – at the university's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. However, new university policies that would have forced Eckert and Mauchly to sign over intellectual property rights for their inventions led to their resignation, which caused a lengthy delay in the EDVAC design efforts. After seeking to join IBM and John von Neumann's team at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, they decided to start their own company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Mauchly persuaded the United States Census Bureau to order an "EDVAC II" computer – a model, soon renamed UNIVAC – receiving a contract in 1948 that called for having the machine ready for the 1950 census.
Eckert hired a staff that included a number of the engineers from the Moore School, the company launched an ambitious program to design and manufacture large-scale computing machines. A major achievement was the use of magnetic tape for high-speed storage. During development Mauchly started a software department, they developed applications, starting with the world's first compiler for the language Short Code. EMCC received contracts for one UNIVAC machine each for the Army and Air Force; these contracts were canceled after the company was accused of having hired engineers with "Communistic leanings" during the McCarthy era. The company lost its clearance for government work. Company president and chief salesman Mauchly was banned from the company property, he challenged the accusations, but it took two years before a hearing allowed him to work at his company again. The programming to allow the UNIVAC I to be used in predicting the outcome of the 1952 Presidential election had to be done by Mauchly and University of Pennsylvania statistician Max Woodbury at Mauchly's home in Ambler, Pennsylvania.
Cash flow was poor and the UNIVAC would not be finished for quite some time, so EMCC decided to take on another project that would be done quickly. This was a small computer for the Northrop corporation. Original estimates for the development costs proved to be unrealistic, by the summer of 1948, EMCC had just about run out of money, but it was temporarily saved by Harry L. Straus, vice president of the American Totalisator Company, a Baltimore company that made electromechanical totalisators. Straus felt that EMCC's work, besides being promising in general terms, might have some application in the race track business, invested $500,000 in the company. Straus became chairman of the EMCC board, American Totalisator received 40 percent of the stock; when Straus was killed in an airplane crash in October 1949, American Totalisator's directors withdrew their support. BINAC was delivered in 1949, but Northrop complained that it never worked well for them, it was believed at EMCC that Northrop allowed BINAC to sit, disassembled, in their parking lot for a long time before any effort toward assembly was made.
As had happened with BINAC, EMCC's estimates of delivery dates and costs proved to be optimistic, the company was soon in financial difficulty again. In early 1950, the company was for sale. Remington Rand made the first offer, purchased EMCC on February 15, 1950, whereupon it became the UNIVAC division of Remington Rand; the first UNIVAC was not delivered until March 1951, over a year after EMCC was acquired by Remington Rand, too late to help much for the 1950 census. However, upon acceptance at the company premises, truck load after truck load of punched cards arrived to be recorded on tape for processing by UNIVAC; the US Census Bureau use
UNIVAC is a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. The name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company and successor organizations; the BINAC, built by the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, was the first general-purpose computer for commercial use. The descendants of the UNIVAC 1107 continue today as products of the Unisys company. J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly built the ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering between 1943 and 1946. A 1946 patent rights dispute with the university led Eckert and Mauchly to depart the Moore School to form the Electronic Control Company renamed Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; that company first built. Afterwards began the development of UNIVAC. UNIVAC was first intended for the Bureau of the Census, which paid for much of the development, was put in production. With the death of EMCC's chairman and chief financial backer Harry L. Straus in a plane crash on October 25, 1949, EMCC was sold to typewriter maker Remington Rand on February 15, 1950.
Eckert and Mauchly now reported to Leslie Groves, the retired army general who had managed the Manhattan Project. The most famous UNIVAC product was the UNIVAC I mainframe computer of 1951, which became known for predicting the outcome of the U. S. presidential election the following year. This incident is noteworthy because the computer predicted an Eisenhower landslide when traditional pollsters all called it for Adlai Stevenson; the numbers were so skewed that CBS's news boss in New York, decided the computer was in error and refused to allow the prediction to be read. Instead they showed some staged theatrics that suggested the computer was not responsive, announced it was predicting 8-7 odds for an Eisenhower win; when the predictions proved true and Eisenhower won a landslide within 1% of the initial prediction, Charles Collingwood, the on-air announcer, embarrassingly announced that they had covered up the earlier prediction. The United States Army requested a UNIVAC computer from Congress in 1951.
Colonel Wade Heavey explained to the Senate subcommittee that the national mobilization planning involved multiple industries and agencies: "This is a tremendous calculating process...there are equations that can not be solved by hand or by electrically operated computing machines because they involve millions of relationships that would take a lifetime to figure out." Heavey told the subcommittee it was needed to help with mobilization and other issues similar to the invasion of Normandy that were based on the relationships of various groups. Remington Rand had its own calculating machine lab in Norwalk and bought Engineering Research Associates in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1953 or 1954 Remington Rand merged their Norwalk tabulating machine division, the ERA "scientific" computer division, the UNIVAC "business" computer division into a single division under the UNIVAC name; this annoyed those, with ERA and with the Norwalk laboratory. In 1955 Remington Rand merged with Sperry Corporation to become Sperry Rand.
The UNIVAC division of Remington Rand was renamed the Univac division of Sperry Rand. General Douglas MacArthur was chosen to head the company. In the 1960s, UNIVAC was one of the eight major American computer companies in an industry referred to as "IBM and the seven dwarfs" — a play on Snow White and the seven dwarfs, with IBM, by far the largest, being cast as Snow White and the other seven as being dwarfs: Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC, GE, RCA and Honeywell. In the 1970s, after GE sold its computer business to Honeywell and RCA sold its to Univac, the analogy to the seven dwarfs became less apt and the remaining small firms became known as the "BUNCH". To assist "corporate identity" the name was changed to Sperry Univac, along with Sperry Remington, Sperry New Holland, etc. In 1978, Sperry Rand, a conglomerate of various divisions, decided to concentrate on its computing interests and all of the unrelated divisions were sold; the company reverted to Sperry Corporation. In 1986, Sperry Corporation merged with Burroughs Corporation to become Unisys.
Since the 1986 merger of Burroughs and Sperry, Unisys has evolved from a computer manufacturer to a computer services and outsourcing firm, competing in the same marketplace as IBM, Electronic Data Systems, Computer Sciences Corporation. Unisys continues to design and manufacture enterprise class computers with the ClearPath and ES7000 server lines. In the course of its history, UNIVAC produced a number of separate model ranges. Early UNIVAC 1100 series models were vacuum tube computers; the original model range was the second commercial computer made in the United States. The main memory consisted of tanks of liquid mercury implementing delay line memory, arranged in 1000 words of 12 alphanumeric characters each; the first machine was delivered on 31 March 1951. The UNIVAC II was an improvement to the UNIVAC I that UNIVAC first delivered in 1958; the improvements included magnetic core memory of 2000 to 10000 words, UNISERVO II tape drives which could use either the old UNIVAC I metal tapes or the new PET film tapes, some circuits that were transistorized (
Norwegian Computing Center
Norwegian Computing Center is a private, non-profit research foundation founded in 1952. NR carries out contract research and development in the areas of computing and quantitative methods for a broad range of industrial and public service organisations in the national and international markets. NR's projects cover a large variety of academic problems. NR has its offices near the university campus Blindern in Oslo, Norway, as part of what is known as Forskningsparken, Park of Research. NR was established in 1952; until 1970 an important part of the activity was to perform mathematical computations for other organizations. NR has worked with data communication since 1963; the Simula programming language was designed and built by Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard and their research group at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo between 1962 and 1967. After 1970 NR has been a methodological research institute. In 1985, NR became an independent institute and moved to its present location in 1988.
It has worked with the Internet since 1973, ICT security since 1988, multimedia since 1994, e-Inclusion since 2005. It started working with remote sensing in 1982, geostatistics and petroleum in 1983, marine resources in 1988 and electricity prices and finance in 1994. A book about the history of NR, Norsk Regnesentrals historie 1952 - 2002 was published in 2002. Department of Applied Research in Information Technology works with project-oriented applied research within multimedia, information security, information privacy and risks, universal design, e-inclusion. In addition to research, DART's work covers concept studies, consultancy, training and evaluation. Department of Statistical Analysis, Image Analysis, Pattern Recognition works with project-oriented applied research in all areas of mathematical statistics; the main application areas are Statistics for Climate, Marine Resources and Health, Statistics for Finance and Commodity Markets, Statistics for Technology and Administration, Earth Observation, Image Analysis and Pattern Recognition.
Department of Statistical Analysis of Natural Resource Data works with project-oriented applied research statistics related to the petroleum industry. The group is a significant international contributor to research and services within reservoir description, stochastic modeling and geostatistics for the petroleum industry; the primary goal is to use statistical methods to quantify risk and uncertainty. The main area is stochastic modeling of the geology in petroleum reservoirs including upscaling and history matching. There is a significant activity on all kinds of risk quantification within the energy sector. NR is the host for a Centre for research based innovation, Statistics for Innovation with a funding from the Research Council of Norway in the period 2007-2014. NR employees Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard received the ACM Turing Award in 2001 and the 2002 IEEE John von Neumann Medal for the introduction of the concepts underlying object-oriented programming through the design and implementation of Simula 67.
Norsk Regnesentral / Norwegian Computing Center Norwegian Computing Center's annual public reports Tribute to Kristen Nygaard Department of Informatics, UiO Tribute to Ole Johan Dahl Department of Informatics, UiO
Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical types or the digital equivalents. Stored letters and other symbols are retrieved and ordered according to a language's orthography for visual display. Typesetting requires one or more fonts. One significant effect of typesetting was that authorship of works could be spotted more making it difficult for copiers who have not gained permission. During much of the letterpress era, movable type was composed by hand for each page. Cast metal sorts were composed into words lines paragraphs pages of text and bound together to make up a form, with all letter faces the same "height to paper", creating an surface of type; the form was placed in a press, an impression made on paper. During typesetting, individual sorts are picked from a type case with the right hand, set into a composing stick held in the left hand from left to right, as viewed by the setter upside down; as seen in the photo of the composing stick, a lower case'q' looks like a'd', a lower case'b' looks like a'p', a lower case'p' looks like a'b' and a lower case'd' looks like a'q'.
This is reputed to be the origin of the expression "mind your p's and q's". It might just as have been "mind your b's and d's"; the diagram at right illustrates a cast metal sort: a face, b body or shank, c point size, 1 shoulder, 2 nick, 3 groove, 4 foot. Wooden printing sorts were in use for centuries in combination with metal type. Not shown, more the concern of the casterman, is the “set”, or width of each sort. Set width, like body size, is measured in points. In order to extend the working life of type, to account for the finite sorts in a case of type, copies of forms were cast when anticipating subsequent printings of a text, freeing the costly type for other work; this was prevalent in book and newspaper work where rotary presses required type forms to wrap an impression cylinder rather than set in the bed of a press. In this process, called stereotyping, the entire form is pressed into a fine matrix such as plaster of Paris or papier mâché called a flong to create a positive, from which the stereotype form was electrotyped, cast of type metal.
Advances such as the typewriter and computer would push the state of the art farther ahead. Still, hand composition and letterpress printing have not fallen out of use, since the introduction of digital typesetting, it has seen a revival as an artisanal pursuit. However, it is a small niche within the larger typesetting market; the time and effort required to manually compose the text led to several efforts in the 19th century to produce mechanical typesetting. While some, such as the Paige compositor, met with limited success, by the end of the 19th century, several methods had been devised whereby an operator working a keyboard or other devices could produce the desired text. Most of the successful systems involved the in-house casting of the type to be used, hence are termed "hot metal" typesetting; the Linotype machine, invented in 1884, used a keyboard to assemble the casting matrices, cast an entire line of type at a time. In the Monotype System, a keyboard was used to punch a paper tape, fed to control a casting machine.
The Ludlow Typograph otherwise used hot metal. By the early 20th century, the various systems were nearly universal in large newspapers and publishing houses. Phototypesetting or "cold type" systems first appeared in the early 1960s and displaced continuous casting machines; these devices consisted of glass or film disks or strips that spun in front of a light source to selectively expose characters onto light-sensitive paper. They were driven by pre-punched paper tapes, they were connected to computer front ends. One of the earliest electronic photocomposition systems was introduced by Fairchild Semiconductor; the typesetter typed a line of text on a Fairchild keyboard. To verify correct content of the line it was typed a second time. If the two lines were identical a bell rang and the machine produced a punched paper tape corresponding to the text. With the completion of a block of lines the typesetter fed the corresponding paper tapes into a phototypesetting device that mechanically set type outlines printed on glass sheets into place for exposure onto a negative film.
Photosensitive paper was exposed to light through the negative film, resulting in a column of black type on white paper, or a galley. The galley was cut up and used to create a mechanical drawing or paste up of a whole page. A large film negative of the page is used to make plates for offset printing; the next generation of phototypesetting machines to emerge were those that generated characters on a cathode ray tube. Typical of the type were the Alphanumeric APS2, IBM 2680, I. I. I. VideoComp, Autologic APS5, Linotron 202; these machines were the mainstay of phototypesetting for much of the 1980s. Such machines could be "driven online" by a computer front-end system or took their data from magnetic tape. Type fonts were stored digitally on conventional magnetic disk drives. Computers excel at automatically correcting documents. Character-by-character, computer-aided phototypesetting was, in turn rendered obsolete in the 1980s by digital systems employing a raster image processor to render an entire page to a single high-resolution digital image, now known as imagesetting.
The first commercially successful laser imagesetter, able to make use of a raster image p
Education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, values and habits. Educational methods include storytelling, teaching and directed research. Education takes place under the guidance of educators and learners may educate themselves. Education can take place in formal or informal settings and any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts may be considered educational; the methodology of teaching is called pedagogy. Formal education is divided formally into such stages as preschool or kindergarten, primary school, secondary school and college, university, or apprenticeship. A right to education has been recognized by the United Nations. In most regions, education is compulsory up to a certain age. Etymologically, the word "education" is derived from the Latin word ēducātiō from ēducō, related to the homonym ēdūcō from ē- and dūcō. Education began in prehistory, as adults trained the young in the knowledge and skills deemed necessary in their society.
In pre-literate societies, this was achieved orally and through imitation. Story-telling passed knowledge and skills from one generation to the next; as cultures began to extend their knowledge beyond skills that could be learned through imitation, formal education developed. Schools existed in Egypt at the time of the Middle Kingdom. Plato founded the Academy in the first institution of higher learning in Europe; the city of Alexandria in Egypt, established in 330 BCE, became the successor to Athens as the intellectual cradle of Ancient Greece. There, the great Library of Alexandria was built in the 3rd century BCE. European civilizations suffered a collapse of literacy and organization following the fall of Rome in CE 476. In China, Confucius, of the State of Lu, was the country's most influential ancient philosopher, whose educational outlook continues to influence the societies of China and neighbours like Korea and Vietnam. Confucius gathered disciples and searched in vain for a ruler who would adopt his ideals for good governance, but his Analects were written down by followers and have continued to influence education in East Asia into the modern era.
The Aztecs had a well-developed theory about education, which has an equivalent word in Nahuatl called tlacahuapahualiztli. It means "the art of raising or educating a person" or "the art of strengthening or bringing up men." This was a broad conceptualization of education, which prescribed that it begins at home, supported by formal schooling, reinforced by community living. Historians cite that formal education was mandatory for everyone regardless of social class and gender. There was the word neixtlamachiliztli, "the act of giving wisdom to the face." These concepts underscore a complex set of educational practices, oriented towards communicating to the next generation the experience and intellectual heritage of the past for the purpose of individual development and his integration into the community. After the Fall of Rome, the Catholic Church became the sole preserver of literate scholarship in Western Europe; the church established cathedral schools in the Early Middle Ages as centres of advanced education.
Some of these establishments evolved into medieval universities and forebears of many of Europe's modern universities. During the High Middle Ages, Chartres Cathedral operated the famous and influential Chartres Cathedral School; the medieval universities of Western Christendom were well-integrated across all of Western Europe, encouraged freedom of inquiry, produced a great variety of fine scholars and natural philosophers, including Thomas Aquinas of the University of Naples, Robert Grosseteste of the University of Oxford, an early expositor of a systematic method of scientific experimentation, Saint Albert the Great, a pioneer of biological field research. Founded in 1088, the University of Bologne is considered the first, the oldest continually operating university. Elsewhere during the Middle Ages, Islamic science and mathematics flourished under the Islamic caliphate, established across the Middle East, extending from the Iberian Peninsula in the west to the Indus in the east and to the Almoravid Dynasty and Mali Empire in the south.
The Renaissance in Europe ushered in a new age of scientific and intellectual inquiry and appreciation of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg developed a printing press, which allowed works of literature to spread more quickly; the European Age of Empires saw European ideas of education in philosophy, religion and sciences spread out across the globe. Missionaries and scholars brought back new ideas from other civilizations – as with the Jesuit China missions who played a significant role in the transmission of knowledge and culture between China and Europe, translating works from Europe like Euclid's Elements for Chinese scholars and the thoughts of Confucius for European audiences; the Enlightenment saw the emergence of a more secular educational outlook in Europe. In most countries today, full-time education, whether at school or otherwise, is compulsory for all children up to a certain age. Due to this the proliferation of compulsory education, combined with population growth, UNESCO has calculated that in the next 30 years more people will receive formal education than in all of human history thus far.
Formal education occurs in a structured environment. Formal education takes place in a school environme