The AK-47, officially known as the Avtomat Kalashnikova, is a gas-operated assault rifle that is chambered for the 7.62×39mm cartridge. Developed in the Soviet Union by Russian small-arms designer Mikhail Kalashnikov, it is the originating firearm of the Kalashnikov family of rifles. After more than seven decades since its creation, the AK-47 model and its variants remain one of the most popular and widely used firearms in the world.
Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much non-fiction.
Leonhard Euler was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, logician and engineer who founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made pioneering and influential discoveries in many other branches of mathematics such as analytic number theory, complex analysis, and infinitesimal calculus. He introduced much of modern mathematical terminology and notation, including the notion of a mathematical function. He is also known for his work in mechanics, fluid dynamics, optics, astronomy and music theory.
Stephen Edwin King is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, crime, science-fiction, and fantasy novels. Described as the "King of Horror", a play on his surname and a reference to his high standing in pop culture, his books have sold more than 350 million copies as of 2006, and many have been adapted into films, television series, miniseries, and comic books. King has published 64 novels, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, and five non-fiction books. He has also written approximately 200 short stories, most of which have been published in book collections.
Time travel is the concept of movement between certain points in time, analogous to movement between different points in space by an object or a person, typically with the use of a hypothetical device known as a time machine. Time travel is a widely recognized concept in philosophy and fiction, particularly science fiction. The idea of a time machine was popularized by H. G. Wells' 1895 novel The Time Machine.
1773 (MDCCLXXIII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Tuesday of the Julian calendar, the 1773rd year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 773rd year of the 2nd millennium, the 73rd year of the 18th century, and the 4th year of the 1770s decade. As of the start of 1773, the Gregorian calendar was 11 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.
Phillis Wheatley Peters, also spelled Phyllis and Wheatly was an American author who is considered the first African-American author of a published book of poetry. Born in West Africa, she was kidnapped and subsequently sold into enslavement at the age of seven or eight and transported to North America, where she was bought by the Wheatley family of Boston. After she learned to read and write, they encouraged her poetry when they saw her talent.
A world war is an international conflict which involves most or all of the world's major powers. Conventionally, the term is reserved for two major international conflicts that occurred during the first half of the 20th century, World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–1945), although historians have also described other global conflicts as world wars, such as the Nine Years' War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years' War, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Cold War, and the War on Terror.
Kip Stephen Thorne is an American theoretical physicist known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. A longtime friend and colleague of Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, he was the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) until 2009 and speaks of the astrophysical implications of general theory of relativity. He continues to do scientific research and scientific consulting, most notably for the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar. Thorne was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves".
Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky, was a Soviet singer-songwriter, poet, and actor who had an immense and enduring effect on Soviet culture. He became widely known for his unique singing style and for his lyrics, which featured social and political commentary in often humorous street-jargon. He was also a prominent stage- and screen-actor. Though the official Soviet cultural establishment largely ignored his work, he was remarkably popular during his lifetime, and to this day exerts significant influence on many of Russia's musicians and actors.
Sergei Petrovich Novikov is a Soviet and Russian mathematician, noted for work in both algebraic topology and soliton theory. In 1970, he won the Fields Medal.
Matthew Colin Taibbi is an American author, journalist, and podcaster. He has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports. A former contributing editor for Rolling Stone, he is an author of several books, co-host of Useful Idiots, and publisher of the newsletter Racket News on Substack.
Nikolay Ivanovich Novikov was a writer and philanthropist most representative of his country's Enlightenment. Frequently considered to be the first Russian journalist, he aimed at advancing the cultural and educational level of the Russian public.
Alexander Alexandrovich Novikov was the chief marshal of aviation for the Soviet Air Force during the Soviet Union's involvement in the Second World War. Lauded as "the man who has piloted the Red Air Force through the dark days into the present limelight", and a "master of tactical air power", he was twice given the title of Hero of the Soviet Union as well as a number of other Soviet decorations.
Vsyakaya vsyachina was a Russian weekly magazine, established in 1769. It was based in Saint Petersburg.
Truten was a Russian weekly satirical magazine, published by Nikolay Novikov from May 1, 1769 to April 27, 1770 in Saint Petersburg. In 1769, there were 36 issues of the magazine and 17 in 1770.
Andrei Georgievich Doroshkevich is a Russian theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist, head of the laboratory on the physics of the early universe at the Lebedev Physical Institute.
Atanasije Stojković was a Serbian, Austrian and Russian writer, pedagogue, scholar, physicist, mathematician and astronomer of Serb origin. He is considered as the finder of the Russian meteoritics. Stojković was the president of the Imperial University of Kharkov from 1807 to 1809 and from 1811 to 1813.
A causal loop also known as a bootstrap paradox, information loop, ontological paradox, and a predestination paradox is a theoretical proposition, wherein by means of either retrocausality or time travel, an event is among the causes of another event, which is in turn among the causes of the first-mentioned event. Such causally looped events then exist in spacetime, but their origin cannot be determined. A hypothetical example of a causality loop is given of a billiard ball striking its past self: the billiard ball moves in a path towards a time machine, and the future self of the billiard ball emerges from the time machine before its past self enters it, giving its past self a glancing blow, altering the past ball's path and causing it to enter the time machine at an angle that would cause its future self to strike its past self the very glancing blow that altered its path. In this sequence of events, the change in the ball's path is its own cause, which might appear paradoxical.
Lyudmila Vsevolodovna Keldysh was a Soviet mathematician known for set theory and geometric topology.
