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Im not an expert by any means but I've always been fascinated with Dark Ages/ early medieval British/european history from Roman Empire to the invasions of the Saxons, then Vikings, and Normans etc.. Britain is such a melting pot of invading cultures and the evidence is still here to see this day. From modern places still having their Viking names, to the walls of Chester in parts still being the original Roman masonry. Its really cool.

I lived in Chester for about 18 months, went to uni there before I dropped out (actually around the time I first joined Nightly was when I lived there), and I loved it, still my favourite city to visit. There's a section of the city walls where you can still see the scars from the cannonballs fired at it during the Civil War (if I remember correctly, it was a Royalist stronghold that held for a long time and was one of the last to surrender). Have you ever been there?

 

Yeah my parents live not far from Chester, and my step sister lives in Chester. I've been a handful of times, and walked the wall and looked at the old roman foundations/ruins they have there. Definitely one of my favorite towns in the north. The old Roman fort in the Hard Nock Pass in the Lake District is also pretty amazing (as is the drive).. to think they managed to get all the way up that high in that miserable inhospitable landscape amazes me.

 

Sweet, I'll have to try and visit Hard Nock Pass, I like going to places like that, like Fishbourne Palace etc.

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My mother is from Chester......South Carolina.

 

Not sure about you guys but I've researched my family histiory to death, and one of the nuggets that I came across is that I have ancestor who was partially responible for New Jersey. Probably not a good thing, i know, but still cool to know.

 

Had no idea that there was an island called Jersey and that French Hugonaughts named New Jersey accordingly when they came to America.

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Not sure about you guys but I've researched my family histiory to death, and one of the nuggets that I came across is that I have ancestor who was partially responible for New Jersey. Probably not a good thing, i know, but still cool to know.

I'm half Irish, my great-grandfather was Grand Master of the Orange Order and my mum's family name is Trimble. My grandfather, the one who's name I use, had a bakery on the Shankhill Road right on the wall. If you know modern Irish/the Troubles history at all, you'll understand why those three pieces of information are things we keep to ourselves whenever we're over there, especially when talking to strangers in Belfast.

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I have an Erdos number of 3. This is essentially the same idea of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon but uses academic collaborations instead of movie appearances. Every person working in the mathematical sciences that I've tried looking up the Erdos number of has one of either 3 or 4, so I think that is a pretty common number for today's active researchers.

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That is pretty cool. My Erdos Number is like 6. But my math circles now are mostly elementary school teachers. In '97 I took a topology course. San Antonio's kind of out of the way but it's up and coming now in research. Each week I put a bulletin board up of mathematicians with facts about them.

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My favorite way of getting a feel for mathematical history is through the Mathematics Genealogy Project, which can be found at the following URL: https://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/ . It tracks academic family trees through academic advising. For modern researchers, it only looks at doctoral recipients and their advisors for those degrees, but it is much more lax with historical researchers since studies were more informal throughout history. I don't want to comment too much on my specific academic genealogy, but it was fascinating to see some huge names not that far back in the line. I've spent tons of time looking through this, between tracing my lineage way back through to Copernicus (which 133,880 people listed on there could do via complete records, not even mentioning those that may have incomplete records) and looking up names that I see along the way.

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  • 2 weeks later...

My biggest fascination with history is/are the Indo Europeans. These people shaped the world that we live in. They branched out of modern day Ukraine to dominate our culture, both east and west.

 

Make no mistake, these are the people that conquered the ancient world and we all descend from them.

 

It's a touchy subject, given the racial implications, but I think it gives an excellent framework of our basic history. These were the guys that ran the show. The Mesoptomians and the Egyptians get the press because of the Bible but in reality it was the IE that laid the foundation of western culture.

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