The story of Joseph has been praised as a treasure of world literature. Voltaire confessed it is one of the most precious documents handed down to our own age from antiquity. Neither Egypt nor Babylon can offer anything even remotely comparable. The matchless narrative of the lost son moves old and young alike. As a literary work, it is artistic perfection. The literary genius of The Joseph Nar...

Voltaire said that Archimedes had more imagination than Homer. Unfortunately, as far as we know, Archimedes’s only use of it, outside of mathematics, was to condemn goldsmiths and to kill people. More peaceful uses of mathematicians’ imagination, to the outside of mathematics, in decreasing order of impact, were provided by Multi-Millionaire Richard Garfield, the Reverend Charles Dodgson, and M...

T HE.movement for the abolition of capital punishment is righty associ~ted with the writers of the Enlightenment, especially Beccaria, whose enormously influential tract appeared in 1764. Perhaps because the abolitionists drew so much attention to the gore of the capital sanctions of the eighteenth century, it has seldom been realized that capital punishment was already in a deep decline in the...

Voltaire, after suffering an attack of smallpox, wrote in a letter to Baron de Breteuil, ‘‘.the diseases that afflict us are as different as the features on our faces’’ (1723). Systematic sequencing of cancer genomes in the last 5 years has unmasked the countless faces of cancer, laying bare the uniqueness of each patient’s tumor; in its cancer genes, its mutational processes, its clonal archit...