Friday, February 12, 2016

Kyzylkum desert unusual winter snows

The Uzbek Kyzylkum desert covered with snow
Source: State Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan for Nature Protection
 
This winter the Kyzylkum desert (in summer one of the hottest places in Uzbekistan) has seen a lot of snow which is a rarely observed phenomenon.

Read the full story in http://www.uzdaily.com/articles-id-35096.htm


The Kyzyl Kum (red) desert is located between the rivers Amu Darya and Syr Darya, north of the Karakum (black) desert. It mainly consists of sand dunes and is located on a vast plateau (with an average elevation of 300 m above sea level in the southeast and 53 m in the northwest). Temperatures can be very high during the summer months, from mid-May to mid-September (up +50 °C in July ) and relatively cold winters (from 0 °C to –9 °C in January). The annual precipitation is low, from 100 mm to 200 mm, most of which falls in winter and spring.

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Short photo essay on Karakalpakstan

The father of Algebra - The great mathematician Al-Khwarizmi

Muhammad ibn Musa Khwarizmi (780-850 CE), from Khwarezm (based around north western Uzbekistan) was the greatest scientist of his time, working in mathematics, geography, and astronomy. From a variant of his name "Al-Khwarizimi", has come the words "algorism/algorithm," and "logarithm". The word 'algorithm' signifying arithmetic, or at any rate any process involving repeated calculation.  He wrote a treatise in Arabic language in the 9th century, which was translated into Latin in the 12th century under the title Algoritmi de numero Indorum. This title means "Algoritmi on the numbers of the Indians", where "Algoritmi" was the translator's Latin for Al-Khwarizmi's name. The book introduced the concept of the Algorithm, which is used in our everyday lives. Al-Khwarizmi was the most widely read mathematician in Europe in the late Middle Ages, primarily through his other book, Compendious Book of Calculation by Completion and Balancing, known in the west simply as the "Algebra" This work became 'the prototype' for all works on Algebra and is undoubtedly the beginning of algebraic calculus and decimal arithmetic.

In CE 825 Al-Khwarizmi wrote his famous treatise on Algebra entitled 'Kitab al Mukhtassar fi'l hisab al jabr wa'l muqabalah' (Compendious Book of Calculation by Completion and Balancing). The book introduced the fundamental concept of "reduction" and "balancing", referring to the transposition of subtracted terms to the other side of an equation (termed the completing part) , that is, the cancellation of like terms on opposite sides of the equation. This is the operation which Al-Khwarizmi originally described as al-jabr. In it he gave numerous detailed examples including an exhaustive account of solving polynomials up to the second degree.]

Kitab al-mukhtasar was also instrumental in introducing the numerical system and the use of the zero, which derives from the Arabic sifr, 'void.The book was the first to introduce squares, roots, and numbers to describe equations. It also introduced a method similar to long division to extract the square root (jithr) of a number and was the first to introduce the concept of mal (power) for the squared unknown variable. In he gave geometrical solutions of quadratic equations. And set out geometric representations of quadratic equations having two variables, e.g. the circle, ellipse, parabola and hyperbola (conic sections) etc. He also dealt with measuring areas and volumesIt was also the first work in which that word Algebra appears in the mathematical sense, 'Algebra' meaning in Arabic 'restoration', that is the transposing of negative terms of an equation and set algebra as a subject independent of geometry" This is perhaps one of the most significant advances ever made in mathematics and was a revolutionary move away from the Greek concept of mathematics which was essentially geometry. Algebra was a unifying theory which allowed rational numbers, irrational numbers, geometrical magnitudes, etc., to all be treated as "algebraic objects". It gave mathematics a whole new development path so much broader in concept to that which had existed before, and provided a vehicle for future development of mathematics in later times.

Thursday, February 4, 2016

Lilac Road by Ural Tansykbayev Savisky Nukus Art Museum Masterpiece

Ural  Tanyskybayev

was a renowned Kazakh artist born in Tashkent (1904-1974). He attended a Russian-Uzbek school from 1916-1919 and subsequently worked at a tobacco factory and a winery between 1919-1924. In was in this period that Tanyskbayev first started to make sketches and small drawings in his tattered sketchbook. His paintings were shown in the club of the plant. In 1924 in the newspaper "Turkestanskaya pravda" there was an article about the young artist and he came to the attention Nikolay Vasilyevich Rozanov (1869–1940) and was invited to study with him and a number of other of renowned painters and followers of the Peredvizhniki ("Wanderers") in their studio at the Tashkent Museum of Art where he stayed until 1927. From there he went to study for two years at the Art and Pedagogical Technical School, Penza under the great Ivan Silovich Goryushkin-Sorokopudov (1873–1954) and Nikolay Filippovich Petrov (1872–1941). Visiting a number of museums and studios in Moscow during 1929, he started to became interested in Fauvism and the works of the French Expressionist's, which had a major impact and from that time on there was a noticeable increased decorativeness and heightened sense of colour in his work. From 1929 he started to participate in art exhibitions and in the year 1932 became a Steering Committee Member of the Union of Artists of Uzbekistan. In 1938 he was the stage and costumes designer at the Kazakh State Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Alma-Ata. He worked on the first national Kazakh ballet based on the poem "Kalkaman and Mamir" by the historian and poet Şekerim Kudayberdiulı (1858–1931) This famous production by the leading Kazakh ballerina and choreographer Shara Zhienkulova (1912–1991) using music composed by Vasily Vasilyevich Velikanov (1842-1904).

Lilac Road by Ural Tansykbayev
A member of the Uzbekistan delegation he paid a visit to the World War II front in 1942. Jointly with artists M.Arinin, S.Cheprakov, and Madra Mandicencio, he made more than thirty monumental paintings for the Uzbek pavilion at All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (VSKhV) now the All-Russia Exhibition Centre in Moscow from 1952–1955. He was elected member-correspondent of the Academy of Arts of the USSR in 1954, and a full member of the Academy of Arts of the USSR in 1958. That year he was awarded a silver medal at Universal Exhibition in Brussels Expo '58. The theme of his early paintings is connected with the searches for expressive means, forms of reflection of the reality. They are intensive and enriched by their colours, decorative. By the beginning of the 1950s the main genre in his art had become landscapes. He continued to participate in many exhibitions in Uzbekistan, and other parts of the Soviet Union as well as abroad and garnered numerous government accolades. He established very close ties with the Nukus Art museum which obtained many of his earlier works from the late 1920s and early 1930s, regarded by many as the best collection of paintings and graphics of the period. Ural Tansykbayev died in Nukus in 1974 while arranging a solo exhibition.