title: Mary Astor

text: During her time off, Astor took voice training and singing lessons with Francis Stuart, an exponent of Francesco Lamperti, but no roles were offered. Her acting career was then given a boost by her friend, Florence Eldridge, (wife of Fredric March), in whom she confided. Eldridge, who was to star in the stage play "Among the Married" at the Majestic Theatre in Downtown Los Angeles, recommended Astor for the second female lead. The play was a success, and her voice was deemed suitable, being described as low and vibrant. She was happy to work again, but her happiness soon ended. On January 2, 1930, while filming sequences for the Fox movie "Such Men Are Dangerous", Kenneth Hawks was killed in a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific. Astor had just finished a matinee performance at the Majestic when Florence Eldridge gave her the news. She was rushed from the theatre to Eldridge's apartment. A replacement, Doris Lloyd, stepped in for the next show. Astor remained with Eldridge at her apartment for some time, then soon returned to work. Shortly after her husband's death, she debuted in her first talkie, "Ladies Love Brutes" (1930) at Paramount, in which she co-starred with her friend Fredric March. While her career picked up, her private life remained difficult. After working on several more movies, she suffered delayed shock over her husband's death and had a nervous breakdown. During the months of her illness, she was attended to by Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, whom she married on June 29, 1931. That year, she starred as Nancy Gibson in "Smart Woman", playing a woman determined to retrieve her husband from a gold-digging flirtation.


title: Mary Astor

text: In May 1932, the Thorpes purchased a yacht and sailed to Hawaii. Astor was expecting a baby in August, but gave birth in June in Honolulu. The child, a daughter, was named Marylyn Hauoli Thorpe: her first name combined her parents' names, and her middle name is Hawaiian. When they returned to Southern California, Astor freelanced and gained the pivotal role of Barbara Willis in MGM's "Red Dust" (1932) with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. In late 1932, Astor signed a featured player contract with Warner Bros. Meanwhile, besides spending lavishly, her parents invested in the stock market, which often turned out unprofitable. While they remained in Moorcrest, Astor dubbed it a "white elephant", and she refused to maintain the house. She had to turn to the Motion Picture Relief Fund in 1933 to pay her bills. She appeared as the female lead, Hilda Lake, niece of the murder victims, in "The Kennel Murder Case" (1933), co-starring with William Powell as detective Philo Vance. Film critic William K. Everson pronounced it a "masterpiece" in the August 1984 issue of "Films in Review".


title: Mary Astor

text: Soon unhappy with her marriage, due to Thorpe having a short temper and a habit of listing her faults, Astor wanted a divorce by 1933. At a friend's suggestion, she took a break from movie-making in 1933 and visited New York alone. While there, enjoying a whirlwind social life, she met the playwright George S. Kaufman, who was in a strong, but open marriage. She documented their affair in her diary. Thorpe, by now making use of his wife's income, had discovered Astor's diary. He indicated her liaisons with other men, including Kaufman, would be used to claim she was an unfit mother in any divorce proceedings.


title: Mary Astor

text: Dr. Franklyn Thorpe divorced Astor in April 1935. A custody battle over their four-year-old daughter, Marylyn, drew press attention to Astor in 1936. Astor's diary was never formally offered as evidence during the trial, but Thorpe and his lawyers constantly referred to it, and its notoriety grew. Astor admitted that the diary existed and that she had documented her affair with Kaufman, but maintained that many of the parts that had been referred to were forgeries, following the theft of the diary from her desk. The diary was deemed inadmissible as a mutilated document because Thorpe had removed pages referring to himself and had fabricated content. The trial judge, Goodwin J. Knight, ordered it sealed and impounded. Florabel Muir, then with the "New York Daily News" is known to have invented fabricated diary passages in her articles. Interestingly, the plot in a 1934 Perry Mason film in which Astor had recently co-starred, "The Case of the Howling Dog", featured an attempt to access the incriminating diary kept by a woman suspect in a murder case who was having an affair with her married boss.


title: Mary Astor

text: News of the diary became public when Astor's role in "Dodsworth" (1936), as Edith Cortwright, was beginning to be filmed. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was urged to fire her, as her contract included a morality clause, but Goldwyn refused. With Walter Huston in the title role, "Dodsworth" received rave reviews on release, and the public's acceptance assured the studios that casting Astor remained a viable proposition. Ultimately, the scandals caused minimal harm to Astor's career, which was actually revitalized because of the custody fight and the publicity it generated.


title: Mary Astor

text: In 1952, by court order, Astor's diary was removed from the bank vault where it had been sequestered for 16 years and destroyed.


title: Mary Astor

text: In 1937, she returned to the stage in well-received productions of Noël Coward's "Tonight at 8.30", "The Astonished Heart", and "Still Life". She also began performing regularly on radio. Over the next few years, she had roles in "The Prisoner of Zenda" (1937), John Ford's "The Hurricane" (1937), "Midnight" (1939) and "Brigham Young" (1940). In John Huston’s all time classic "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), Astor played scheming temptress Brigid O'Shaughnessy. The film, based upon the novel by Dashiell Hammett, also starred Humphrey Bogart and featured Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. For her performance in "The Great Lie" (also 1941) she won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress in the 14th Academy Awards. As Sandra Kovak, the self absorbed concert pianist who relinquishes her unborn child, her intermittent love interest was played by George Brent, but the film's star was Bette Davis. Davis wanted Astor cast in the role after watching her screen test and seeing her play Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1. She then recruited Astor to collaborate on rewriting the script, which Davis felt was mediocre and needed work to make it more interesting. Astor further followed Davis's advice and sported a bobbed hairdo for the role.


title: Mary Astor

text: The soundtrack of the movie in the scenes where she plays the concerto, with violent hand movements on the piano keyboard, was dubbed by pianist Max Rabinovitch. Davis deliberately stepped back to allow Astor to shine in her key scenes. In her Oscar acceptance speech, Astor thanked Bette Davis and Tchaikovsky. Astor and Davis became good friends.


title: Mary Astor

text: Astor was not propelled into the upper echelon of movie stars by these successes, however. She always declined offers of starring in her own right. Not wanting the responsibility of top billing and having to carry the picture, she preferred the security of being a featured player. She reunited with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in John Huston's "Across the Pacific" (1942). Though usually cast in dramatic or melodramatic roles, Astor showed a flair for comedy as The Princess Centimillia in the Preston Sturges film, "The Palm Beach Story" (also 1942) for Paramount. In February 1943, Astor's father, Otto Langhanke, died in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as a result of a heart attack complicated by influenza. His wife and daughter were at his bedside.


title: Mary Astor

text: That same year, Astor signed a seven-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), a move she soon came to regret. She was kept busy, playing what appeared to be under-written and largely interchangeable supporting roles, a category Astor later dubbed "Mothers for Metro". After "Meet Me in St. Louis" (1944), the studio allowed her to debut on Broadway in "Many Happy Returns" (1945). The play was a failure, but Astor received good reviews. On loan-out to 20th Century Fox, she played a wealthy widow in "Claudia and David" (1946). She was also loaned to Paramount to play Fritzi Haller in "Desert Fury" (1947), the tough owner of a saloon and casino in a small mining town. Before Helen Langhanke died of a heart ailment in January 1947, Astor said she sat in the hospital room with her mother, who was delirious and did not know her, and listened quietly as Helen told her all about terrible, selfish Lucile. After her death, Astor said she spent countless hours copying her mother's diary so she could read it and was surprised to learn how much she was hated. Back at MGM, Astor continued being cast in undistinguished, colorless mother roles. One exception was when she played a prostitute in the film noir "Act of Violence" (1948). The last straw came when she was cast as Marmee March in "Little Women" (1949). Astor found no redemption in playing what she considered another humdrum mother and grew despondent. She later described her disappointment with her cast members and the shoot in her memoir "A Life on Film":


title: Mary Astor

text: At the same time, Astor's drinking was growing troublesome. She admitted to alcoholism as far back as the 1930s, but it had never interfered with her work schedule or performance. She hit bottom in 1949 and went into a sanitarium for alcoholics.


title: Mary Astor

text: In 1951, she made a frantic call to her doctor and said that she had taken too many sleeping pills. She was taken to a hospital and the police reported that she had attempted suicide, this being her third overdose in two years. The story made headline news. She maintained it had been an accident.


title: Mary Astor

text: That same year, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous and converted to Roman Catholicism. She credited her recovery to a priest, Peter Ciklic, also a practicing psychologist, who encouraged her to write about her experiences as part of therapy. She also separated from her fourth husband, Thomas Wheelock (a stockbroker she married on Christmas Day 1945), but did not actually divorce him until 1955.


title: Mary Astor

text: In 1952, she was cast in the leading role of the play "The Time of the Cuckoo", which was later made into the movie "Summertime" (1955), and subsequently toured with it. After the tour, Astor lived in New York for four years and worked in the theater and on television. During the 1952 presidential election, Astor, a lifelong Democrat, supported the campaign of Adlai Stevenson.


title: Mary Astor

text: Her TV debut was in "The Missing Years" (1954) for "Kraft Television Theatre". She acted frequently in TV during the ensuing years and appeared on many big shows of the time, including "The United States Steel Hour", "Alfred Hitchcock Presents", "Rawhide", "Dr. Kildare", "Burke's Law", and "Ben Casey". In 1954, she appeared in the episode "Fearful Hour" of the Gary Merrill NBC series "Justice" in the role of a desperately poor and aging film star who attempts suicide to avoid exposure as a thief. She also played an ex-film star on the Boris Karloff-hosted "Thriller" in an episode titled "Rose's Last Summer."


title: Mary Astor

text: She starred on Broadway again in "The Starcross Story" (1954), another failure, and returned to southern California in 1956. She then went on a successful theatre tour of "Don Juan in Hell" directed by Agnes Moorehead and co-starring Ricardo Montalbán.


title: Mary Astor

text: Astor's memoir, "My Story: An Autobiography", was published in 1959, becoming a sensation in its day and a bestseller. It was the result of Father Ciklic urging her to write. Though she spoke of her troubled personal life, her parents, her marriages, the scandals, her battle with alcoholism, and other areas of her life, she did not mention the movie industry or her career in detail. In 1971, a second book was published, "A Life on Film", where she discussed her career. It, too, became a bestseller. Astor also tried her hand at fiction, writing the novels "The Incredible Charley Carewe" (1960), "The Image of Kate" (1962), which was published in 1964 in a German translation as "Jahre und Tage", "The O'Conners" (1964), "Goodbye, Darling, be Happy" (1965), and "A Place Called Saturday" (1968).


title: Mary Astor

text: She appeared in several movies during this time, including "Stranger in My Arms" (1959). She made a comeback in "Return to Peyton Place" (1961) playing Roberta Carter, the domineering mother who insists the "shocking" novel written by Allison Mackenzie should be banned from the school library, and received good reviews for her performance. According to film scholar Gavin Lambert, Astor invented memorable bits of business in her last scene of that film, where Roberta's vindictive motives are exposed.


title: Mary Astor

text: After a trip around the world in 1964, Astor was lured away from her Malibu, California home, where she was gardening and working on her third novel, to make what she decided would be her final film. She was offered the small role as a key figure, Jewel Mayhew, in the murder mystery "Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte" (1964), starring her friend Bette Davis. She filmed her final scene with Cecil Kellaway at Oak Alley Plantation in southern Louisiana. In "A Life on Film", she described her character as "a little old lady, waiting to die". Astor decided it would serve as her swan song in the movie business. After 109 movies in a career spanning 45 years, she turned in her Screen Actors Guild card and retired.


title: Mary Astor

text: Astor later moved to Fountain Valley, California, where she lived near her son, Anthony del Campo (from her third marriage to Mexican film editor Manuel del Campo), and his family, until 1971. That same year, suffering from a chronic heart condition, she moved to a small cottage on the grounds of the Motion Picture & Television Country House, the industry's retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, where she had a private table when she chose to eat in the resident dining room. She appeared in the television documentary series "Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film" (1980), co-produced by Kevin Brownlow, in which she discussed her roles during the silent film period. After years of retirement, she had been urged to appear in Brownlow's documentary by a former sister-in-law Bessie Love who also appeared in the series.


title: Mary Astor

text: Astor died on September 25, 1987, at age 81, of respiratory failure due to pulmonary emphysema while in the hospital at the Motion Picture House complex. She is interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Astor has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6701 Hollywood Boulevard.


title: Rounders (film)

text: Rounders is a 1998 American drama film about the underground world of high-stakes poker, directed by John Dahl and starring Matt Damon and Edward Norton. The story follows two friends who need to win at high-stakes poker to quickly pay off a large debt. The term "rounder" refers to a person traveling around from city to city seeking high-stakes card games.


title: Rounders (film)

text: "Rounders" opened to mixed reviews and was moderately successful at the box office. Following the poker boom in the early 2000s, the film became a cult hit.


title: Rounders (film)

text: New York City law student and gifted poker player Mike McDermott (Matt Damon) dreams of winning the World Series of Poker. At an underground Texas hold 'em game run by Russian mobster Teddy "KGB" (John Malkovich), an overconfident Mike loses his entire $30,000 bankroll in a single hand. Shaken, he promises his girlfriend and fellow student Jo (Gretchen Mol) he has quit poker, and concentrates on law school. His mentor Joey Knish (John Turturro) offers to stake him to rebuild his bankroll but Mike declines, and instead accepts a part-time job to make ends meet.


title: Rounders (film)

text: Several months pass and Mike stays true to his promise until his childhood friend Lester "Worm" Murphy (Edward Norton) is released from prison. While Mike is an honest player, Worm is a hustler and unapologetic cheat. To help Worm pay off a debt, Mike sets him up with games across town and reluctantly sits in on a game, interfering with his studies and his relationship with Jo. Mike allows Worm to play on his credit at the Chesterfield Club; however, after a profitable session, he takes the profit and a loan, beginning a tab in Mike's name. Worm runs into Grama (Michael Rispoli), a dangerous pimp, who has bought Worm’s debt – Worm now owes $25,000 directly to Grama, who is working for KGB. Grama takes Worm’s $10,000 he left the Chesterfield with, threatening him to pay the rest. As Mike returns to his poker lifestyle and friends, Jo ends their relationship.


title: Rounders (film)

text: Mike learns from Petra (Famke Janssen) at the Chesterfield that Worm has now racked up a $7,000 debt in Mike’s name. In Atlantic City, Worm tells Mike about his debt to Grama but withholds that he is working for KGB. Mike proposes to Grama that Worm pay weekly installments; Grama considers the offer but also mocks Worm for his inability to pay him. Worm responds by insulting Grama and as the two nearly come to blows; Mike defuses the situation by agreeing to vouch for Worm and an angry Grama gives them five days to pay the remaining $15,000. Mike decides to help Worm win the money by playing in several games in and around the city.


title: Rounders (film)

text: On a winning streak, Mike earns $7,200 in three days, but still needs to double it in forty-eight hours. Worm directs Mike to an out-of-town game hosted by New York state troopers, where he wins almost the full $15,000 before Worm unexpectedly joins the game. The troopers catch Worm base-dealing to help Mike; they are beaten up and relieved of their entire bankroll. Worm finally confesses that Grama is working for KGB. With their lives in danger Worm decides to flee, but Mike returns to the city, cutting ties with Worm.


title: Rounders (film)

text: Mike asks Grama for more time, to no avail. He asks Knish for the money but is refused out of principle. During the conversation with Knish, Mike reveals his motivation for taking the ill-fated risk at KGB's club (citing beating poker legend Johnny Chan at a single hand in Atlantic City), and why he thinks he can compete and possibly win the World Series of Poker. Knish stays firm. Desperate, Mike asks his law school professor Petrovsky (Martin Landau), who loans him $10,000. Mike challenges KGB to a second heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em game for the remaining debt, with winner-take-all stakes, which KGB accepts. Mike beats KGB in the first session, winning $20,000. KGB offers to let Mike’s winnings "ride" and continue the game, but Mike – with enough to pay off most of his debts – declines. As he is about to leave, KGB taunts Mike that he is paying him with the money that he lost to KGB from their previous game. Mike changes his mind and decides to continue playing.


title: Rounders (film)

text: Mike doubles the blinds at the risk of losing everything to KGB again, and possibly his life. As the night wears on, he spots KGB's tell and folds, deducing that KGB has a better hand. Irate at the missed chance to win it all, KGB begins to play on "tilt". In the final hand, Mike baits a boastful KGB into going all-in and defeats him with a nut straight. KGB throws a tantrum at having been lured into a mistake. Despite Grama’s urging, KGB, rattled, calls off his goons and admits that Mike won fairly, allowing him to leave with his winnings.


title: Rounders (film)

text: With over $60,000, Mike settles Worm’s $15,000 debt to Grama, the Chesterfield’s $6,000 credit, Petrovsky’s $10,000 loan, and restores his original bankroll of "three stacks of high society." He drops out of law school, says goodbye to Jo, and leaves New York for Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker.


title: Rounders (film)

text: Principal photography for "Rounders" began in December 1997; it took place mostly in New York City. Exceptions include the law school scenes (filmed at Rutgers School of Law-Newark) and the State Trooper poker game and parking lot scenes (filmed at the B.P.O Elks Lodge in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey).


title: Rounders (film)

text: "Rounders" was released on September 11, 1998, in 2,176 theaters and grossed $8.5 million during its opening weekend. It went on to make $22.9 million domestically.


title: Rounders (film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 65% based on 81 reviews, with an average score of 6.20/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Richly atmospheric and colorful performances contributed to the movie's entertainment value." Metacritic gives the film a weighted average score of 54 out of 100 based on 32 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B-" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Rounders (film)

text: Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" gave the film three stars out of four and wrote: ""Rounders" sometimes has a noir look but it never has a noir feel, because it's not about losers (or at least it doesn't admit it is). It's essentially a sports picture, in which the talented hero wins, loses, faces disaster, and then is paired off one last time against the champ." In her review for "The New York Times", Janet Maslin wrote: "Though John Dahl's "Rounders" finally adds up to less than meets the eye, what does meet the eye (and ear) is mischievously entertaining." "USA Today" gave the film three out of four stars and wrote: "The card playing is well-staged, and even those who don't know a Texas hold-'em ('the Cadillac of poker') from a Texas hoedown will get a vicarious charge out of the action." "Entertainment Weekly" gave the film a "B" rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, "Norton, cast in what might have once been the Sean Penn role (hideous shirts, screw-you attitude), gives Worm a shifty, amphetamine soul and a pleasing alacrity ... Norton's performance never really goes anywhere, but that's okay, since the story is just an excuse to lead the characters from one poker table to the next."


title: Rounders (film)

text: Peter Travers, in his review for "Rolling Stone" said of John Malkovich's performance: "Of course, no one could guess the extent to which Malkovich is now capable of chewing scenery. He surpasses even his eyeballrolling as Cyrus the Virus in "Con Air". Munching Oreo cookies, splashing the pot with chips (a poker no-no) and speaking with a Russian accent that defies deciphering ("Ho-kay, Meester sum of a beech"), Malkovich soars so far over the top, he's passing Pluto." In his review for the "San Francisco Chronicle", Mick LaSalle said of Damon's performance: "Mike should supply the drive the film otherwise lacks, and Damon doesn't. We might believe he can play cards, but we don't believe he needs to do it, in the way, say, that the 12-year-old Mozart needed to write symphonies. He's not consumed with genius. He's a nice guy with a skill." In his review for "The Globe and Mail", Liam Lacey wrote: "The main problem with "Rounders" is that the movie never quite knows what it is about: What is the moral ante?"


title: Rounders (film)

text: Despite an unremarkable theatrical release, "Rounders" has a following, particularly among poker enthusiasts.


title: Rounders (film)

text: There are pro poker players who credit the film for getting them into the game. The film drew in successful players such as Brian Rast, Hevad Khan, Gavin Griffin, and Dutch Boyd. Vanessa Rousso has said of the film's influence: "There have been lots of movies that have included poker, but only "Rounders" really captures the energy and tension in the game. And that's why it stands as the best poker movie ever made."


title: Anand Kumar

text: Anand Kumar (born 1 January 1973) is an Indian Mathematics educator best known for his Super 30 programme, which he started in Patna, Bihar in 2002, known for coaching underprivileged students for JEE- Main & JEE-Advanced, the entrance examination for the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). By 2018, 422 out of 510 students had made it to the IITs and Discovery Channel showcased his work in a documentary. Kumar has spoken at MIT and Harvard about his programs for students from the underprivileged sections of Indian society. Kumar and his school have been the subject of several smear campaigns, some of which have been carried in Indian media sources. His life and work had been portrayed in the 2019 film, "Super 30", where Kumar is played by Hrithik Roshan.


title: Anand Kumar

text: Anand Kumar was born in Bihar, India. His father was a clerk in the postal department of India. His father could not afford private schooling for his children, and Anand attended a Hindi medium government school, where he developed his deep interest in mathematics. In his childhood, he studied at Patna High School, in Patna, Bihar. During his graduation, Kumar submitted papers on number theory, which were published in the "Mathematical Spectrum". Kumar secured admission to the University of Cambridge, but could not attend because of his father's death and his financial condition.


title: Anand Kumar

text: In 1992, Kumar began teaching mathematics. He rented a classroom for Rs. 300 per month, and began his own institute, the Ramanujan School of Mathematics (RSM). Within the span of year, his class grew from two students to thirty-six, and after three years almost 500 students had enrolled. Then in early 2000, when a poor student came to him seeking coaching for IIT-JEE, who could not afford the annual admission fee due to poverty, Kumar was motivated to start the Super 30 programme in 2002, for which he is now well-known.


title: Anand Kumar

text: Since 2002, every May, the Ramanujan School of Mathematics holds a competitive test to select 30 students for the Super 30 program. Many students appear at the test, and eventually, he takes thirty intelligent students from economically backward sections, tutors them, and provides study materials and lodging for a year. He prepares them for the Joint Entrance Examination for the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). His mother, Jayanti Devi, cooks for the students, and his brother Pranav Kumar takes care of the management.


title: Anand Kumar

text: During 2003 to 2017, 391 students out of 450 passed the IITs. In 2010, all the students of Super 30 cleared IIT JEE entrance making it a three in a row for the institution. Kumar has no financial support for Super 30 from any government as well as private agencies, and manages on the tuition fee he earns from the Ramanujan Institute. After the success of Super 30 and its growing popularity, he received offers from the private sector – both national and international companies – as well as the government for financial help, but he has refused it; Kumar wanted to sustain Super 30 through his own efforts.


title: Anand Kumar

text: From 2006 to 2007, 30 out of 30 students cleared the IIT-JEE. In subsequent years, the pass rates for the 30 students at the IIT-JEE examinations were: 2011 – 24, 2012–27, 2013–28, 2014–27, 2015–25, 2016–28, 2017–30, and 2018–26.


title: Anand Kumar

text: In 2019, Kumar revealed that he has been suffering from Acoustic neuroma, a rare kind of brain tumor, and lost 80-90% hearing ability of his right ear due to it. He is under treatment of renowned neurosurgeon B. K. Misra at the Hinduja Hospital in Mumbai.


title: Anand Kumar

text: In March 2009, Discovery Channel broadcast a one-hour-long programme on Super 30, and half a page was devoted to Kumar in "The New York Times". Actress and former Miss Japan Norika Fujiwara visited Patna to make a documentary on Kumar's initiatives. Kumar has been featured in programmes by the BBC. He has spoken about his experiences at various global-level institutes including Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, a number of IITs, University of British Columbia, Tokyo University and Stanford University. He was also inducted in the "Limca Book of Records" (2009) for his contribution in helping poor students pass the IIT-JEE by providing them free coaching. "Time" magazine included Super 30 in the list of Best of Asia 2010. Kumar was awarded the S. Ramanujan Award for 2010 by the Institute for Research and Documentation in Social Sciences (IRDS) in July 2010.


title: Anand Kumar

text: Super 30 received praise from United States President Barack Obama's special envoy, Rashad Hussain, who termed it the "best" institute in the country. "Newsweek Magazine" has taken note of the initiative of mathematician Anand Kumar's Super 30 and included his school in the list of four most innovative schools in the world. Kumar was given the top award of Bihar government, "Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad Shiksha Puraskar", in November 2010. He was awarded the "Prof. Yashwantrao Kelkar Yuva Puraskar" award in 2010 by Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) in Bangalore.


title: Anand Kumar

text: In April 2011, Kumar was selected by Europe's magazine "Focus" as "one of the global personalities who have the ability to shape exceptionally talented people." Kumar also helped Amitabh Bachchan in preparing for his role in the film "Aarakshan". Many people from Bollywood including renowned directors and producers are interested in making a movie on the life of Anand Kumar. He was named by UK based magazine "Monocle" among the list of 20 pioneering teachers of the world. He was also honoured by government of British Columbia, Canada. Kumar was given the Baroda Sun Life Achievement Award by Bank of Baroda in Mumbai. Kumar was conferred with the Ramanujan Mathematics Award at the Eighth National Mathematics Convention at function in Rajkot. He was conferred with an Honorary Doctorate of Science (DSc) by Karpagam University, Coimbatore. He was also awarded Maharishi Ved Vyas by Madhya Pradesh Government for extraordinary contribution in education Anand Kumar was honored by ministry of education of Saxony of Germany.


title: Anand Kumar

text: Kumar presented his biography to then-President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, which was written by Canada-based psychiatrist Biju Mathew. Kumar was awarded "Rashtriya Bal Kalyan Award" by president of India Ram Nath Kovind. A Canadian MP Marc Dalton has praised Anand Kumar's "inspiring work" with underprivileged children as a successful model for education in Canadian parliament. Anand Kumar was conferred an honorary PhD by the National Institute of Technology.


title: Anand Kumar

text: On 8 November 2018, Anand Kumar was honoured with the Global Education Award 2018 by Malabar Gold & Diamonds in Dubai. His efforts in the field of education are considered "pioneering". Anand Kumar has been felicitated in the US with "Education Excellence Award 2019 " by the Foundation For Excellence in Education (FFE) at a function in San Jose, California. Anand Kumar received "Mahaveer Award" in Chennai.


title: Anand Kumar

text: Anand Kumar recently awarded with Bharat Ganit Ratna Award 2022- a special award declared by DASA India - National VO operated from Agartala Tripura on 10 March 2022, which has been handed over by Anjan Banik, National Chairman of DASA India.


title: Anand Kumar

text: Bollywood director Vikas Bahl has directed a film titled "Super 30", with Hrithik Roshan as Anand Kumar, based on his life and works. The movie was successful at the box office and became a great inspiration for many students.


title: Anand Kumar

text: On 23 July 2018, an article in Dainik Jagran cited former Super 30 students who said that only three students from the program had passed the IIT JEE exam that year, contrary to Kumar's claim that 26 had passed. The report also claimed that students who sought to enroll in Super 30 were pushed to enroll in another coaching center called Ramanujan Classes, a for-profit institution, on the pretext that Kumar would coach them if they performed well. Furthermore, the article alleged that by asking IIT aspirants to enroll in Ramanujan Classes, Kumar made over Rs 1 crore annually.


title: Anand Kumar

text: Former Deputy Chief Minister of Bihar Tejashwi Yadav spoke in favour of Anand Kumar and said that "propaganda is being run in media influenced by feudal mindset to discredit and defame Anand Kumar." Union Cabinet Minister and former actor, Shatrughan Sinha, has also spoken in Kumar's favour on Twitter. In August 2018, The Hindu reported that Kumar and his school are frequently the target of smear campaigns, and identified the potential sources of the fabricated stories that appeared in the Dainik Jagran newspaper in July.


title: Anand Kumar

text: Dainik Jagran made amends and presented its ‘Editor’s Choice Award’ to Super 30 founder Anand Kumar in 2021 recognising his work in the field of education.


title: Sikh gurus

text: The Sikh gurus (Punjabi: ਸਿੱਖ ਗੁਰੂ) are the spiritual masters of Sikhism, who established this religion over the course of about two and a half centuries, beginning in 1469. The year 1469 marks the birth of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. He was succeeded by nine other human gurus until, in 1708, the "Guruship" was finally passed on by the tenth guru to the holy Sikh scripture, Guru Granth Sahib, which is now considered the living Guru by the followers of the Sikh faith.


title: Sikh gurus

text: "Guru" (, ; , Punjabi: ਗੁਰੂ, IAST: "guru") is a Sanskrit term for a "teacher, guide, expert, or master" of certain knowledge or field. Bhai Vir Singh, in his dictionary of Guru Granth Sahib describes the term Guru as a combination of two separate units: "Gu;(ਗੁ)" meaning darkness and "Rū;(ਰੂ)" which means light. Hence, Guru is who brings light into darkness or in other words, the one who enlightens.


title: Sikh gurus

text: Bhai Vir Singh's definition provides further insight about Sikhi itself and explains why Guru Granth Sahib is considered the living Guru. The word Sikh is derived from the Sanskrit term "shishya"(Punjabi: ਸਿੱਖ) which means a disciple or a student. Thus, Sikhs have a student–teacher relationship with their Gurus since their teachings, written in Guru Granth Sahib, serve as a guide for the Sikhs.


title: Black-footed cat

text: The black-footed cat (Felis nigripes), also called the small-spotted cat, is the smallest wild cat in Africa, having a head-and-body length of . Despite its name, only the soles of its feet are black or dark brown. With its bold small spots and stripes on the tawny fur, it is well camouflaged, especially on moonlit nights. It bears black streaks running from the corners of the eyes along the cheeks, and its banded tail has a black tip.


title: Black-footed cat

text: The first black-footed cat known to science was discovered in the northern Karoo of South Africa and described in 1824. It is endemic to the arid steppes and grassland savannas of Southern Africa. In the late 1960s, it was recorded in southern Botswana, but only few authentic records exist in Namibia, in southern Angola, and in southern Zimbabwe. Due to its restricted distribution, it has been listed as a vulnerable species on the IUCN Red List since 2002. The population is suspected to be declining due to poaching of prey species for human consumption as bushmeat, persecution, traffic accidents, and predation by domestic dogs and cats.


title: Black-footed cat

text: The black-footed cat has been studied using radio telemetry since 1993. This research allowed direct observation of its behaviour in its natural habitat. It usually rests in burrows during the day and hunts at night. It moves between on average, in search of small rodents and birds, mostly moving in small circles and zig-zagging among bushes and termite mounds. It feeds on 40 different vertebrates and kills up to 14 small animals per night. It can catch birds in flight, jumping up to high, and also dares to attack mammals and birds much heavier than itself. A female usually gives birth to two kittens during the Southern Hemisphere summer between October and March. They are weaned at the age of two months and become independent after four months of age at the latest.


title: Black-footed cat

text: The scientific name "Felis nigripes" was used by the British explorer William John Burchell in 1824 when he described the species based on skins of small, spotted cats that he encountered near Litákun (now known as Dithakong), in South Africa.


title: Black-footed cat

text: "Felis" ("Microfelis") "nigripes thomasi" was proposed as a subspecies by the South African mammalogist Guy C. Shortridge in 1931, who described black-footed cat skins collected in Griqualand West that were darker than those of the nominate subspecies.


title: Black-footed cat

text: When the British zoologist Reginald Innes Pocock reviewed cat skins in the collection of the Natural History Museum, London, he corroborated that the black-footed cat is a "Felis" species.


title: Black-footed cat

text: The validity of a subspecies was doubted as no geographical barriers matching the observed differences exist between populations. In 2017, the IUCN Cat Specialist Group revised felid taxonomy and noted that the black-footed cat is most probably a monotypic species.


title: Black-footed cat

text: Phylogenetic analysis of the nuclear DNA from all Felidae species revealed that their evolutionary radiation began in Asia in the Miocene around . Analysis of mitochondrial DNA of all Felidae species indicates that they radiated at around .


title: Black-footed cat

text: The black-footed cat is part of an evolutionary lineage that is estimated to have genetically diverged from the common ancestor of all "Felis" species around , based on analysis of their nuclear DNA. Analysis of their mitochondrial DNA indicates a genetic divergence of "Felis" species at around . Both models agree on the jungle cat ("F. chaus") having been the first "Felis" species that diverged, followed by the black-footed cat.


title: Black-footed cat

text: Fossil remains of the black-footed cat have not been found. It possibly migrated during the Pleistocene into Africa. This migration was possibly facilitated by extended periods of low sea levels between Asia and Africa.


title: Black-footed cat

text: The following cladogram shows the phylogenetic relationships of the black-footed cat as derived through analysis of nuclear DNA:


title: Black-footed cat

text: The black-footed cat has tawny fur that is entirely covered with black spots. Its head is darker than the rest of the body but paler above the eyes. Its whiskers are white, and its ears bear grizzled dark brown hairs. On the neck and back, some spots are elongated into stripes. On the shoulders, the spots form transverse stripes. The forelegs and the hind legs bear irregular stripes. Its tail is confusedly spotted. The underparts of the feet are black. The throat rings form black semi-circles that vary in colour from dusky blackish brown to pale rufous and are narrowly edged with rufous. Some individuals have a pure white belly with a tawny tinge where it blends into the tawny colour of the flanks. The ears, eyes and mouth are lined with pale off-white. Two black streaks run from the corners of the eyes across the cheeks. Individuals vary in background colour from sandy and pale ochre to dark ochre.


title: Black-footed cat

text: In the northern part of its range, it is lighter than in the southern part, where its spots and bands are more clearly defined. The three rings on the throat are reddish brown to black, with the third ring broken in some individuals.


title: Black-footed cat

text: The black bands are broad on the upper legs and become narrower towards the paws. The long guard hairs are gray at the base and have either white or dark tips. The underfur is dense with short and wavy hair. The fur becomes thicker and longer during winter.


title: Black-footed cat

text: The pupils of the eyes contract to a vertical slit, like in all "Felis" species. They are light green to dark yellow.


title: Black-footed cat

text: The black-footed cat is the smallest cat species in Africa. Females measure in head and body length with a long tail. Males are between with a long tail. Its tapering tail is about half the length of the head and body.


title: Black-footed cat

text: Its skull is short and round with a basal length of and a width of . The ear canal and the openings of the ears are larger than in most "Felis" species. The cheek teeth are long and the upper carnassials long.


title: Black-footed cat

text: It has small pointed ears ranging from in females and in males. The hindfoot of females measures maximum and of males maximum .


title: Black-footed cat

text: The African wildcat ("Felis lybica") is almost three times as large as the black-footed cat, has longer legs, a longer tail and mostly plain grey fur with less distinct markings. The serval ("Leptailurus serval") resembles the black-footed cat in coat colour and pattern, but has proportionately larger ears, longer legs and a longer tail.


title: Black-footed cat

text: The black-footed cat is endemic to Southern Africa; its distribution is much more restricted than other small cats in this region. Its range extends from South Africa northward into Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe and possibly into extreme southeastern Angola. It is unlikely to occur in Lesotho and Eswatini. It inhabits open, dry savannas and shrubland in the Karoo and the southwestern Kalahari with short grasses, low bush cover, and scattered clumps of low bush and higher grasses. The mean annual precipitation in this region ranges from .


title: Black-footed cat

text: The black-footed cat is nocturnal and usually solitary, except when females care for dependent kittens. It spends the day resting in hollow termite mounds and dense cover in unoccupied burrows of South African springhare ("Pedetes capensis"), aardvark ("Orycteropus afer"), and Cape porcupine ("Hystrix africaeaustralis"). It digs vigorously to extend or modify these burrows for shelter. After sunset, it emerges to hunt. It seeks refuge at the slightest disturbance and often uses termite mounds for cover or for bearing its young. When cornered, it defends itself fiercely. Due to this habit and its courage, it is called in parts of the South African Karoo (Afrikaans 'anthill tiger'). A San legend claims that a black-footed cat can kill a giraffe by piercing its jugular. This exaggeration is intended to emphasize its bravery and tenacity.


title: Black-footed cat

text: Unlike most other cats, it is a poor climber, as its stocky body and short tail are thought not to be conducive for climbing trees. However, one black-footed cat was observed and photographed resting in the lower branches of a camelthorn tree ("Vachellia erioloba").


title: Black-footed cat

text: A female roams in an average home range of in a year, and a resident male in an area of . The range of an adult male overlaps the ranges of one to four females. It uses scent marking throughout its range. Receptive females were observed spraying urine up to 41 times in a stretch of . They sprayed less frequently during pregnancy. Other forms of scent marking include rubbing objects, raking with claws, and depositing faeces in visible locations. Its calls are louder than those of other cats of its size, presumably to allow calls to be heard over relatively large distances. When close to each other, however, it uses quieter purrs or gurgles; when threatened, it hisses and growls. Adults move an average of per night in search of prey.


title: Black-footed cat

text: It is difficult to survey because of its highly secretive nature; moreover, it tends to move fast without using roads or tracks like other cats. In South Africa, a density of was estimated in Benfontein near Kimberley during 1998 to 1999, that fell to during 2005 to 2014. Farther south, in the Nuwejaarsfontein area, the estimated number of individuals during 2009 to 2014 was . These were probably exceptionally high densities, as both areas feature good weather and management conditions, while the number of individuals in less favourable habitats could be closer to .


title: Black-footed cat

text: The black-footed cat hunts at night irrespective of the weather, at temperatures from . It attacks its prey from the rear, puts its forepaws on its flanks and grounds the prey using its dewclaws. It employs three different ways of hunting: "fast hunt", "slow hunt", and "sit and wait" hunt. In a fast hunt, the cat moves at a speed of and chases prey out of vegetation cover. A slowly hunting cat stalks the prey at a slower speed of , meandering cautiously through the grass and vigilantly checking its surroundings while turning its head side to side. In a "sit and wait" hunt, it waits for the prey motionlessly in front of a rodent den, sometimes with closed eyes. Its ears keep moving, and as soon as it hears a sound, it opens the eyes.


title: Black-footed cat

text: Due to its small size, the black-footed cat hunts mainly small prey such as rodents and small birds, but also preys on Cape hare ("Lepus capensis"), being heavier than itself. Its energy requirement is very high, with about of prey consumed per night, which is about a sixth of its average body weight.


title: Black-footed cat

text: In 1993, a female and a male black-footed cat were followed for 622 hours and observed hunting. They caught vertebrates every 50 minutes and killed up to 14 small animals in a night. They killed shrews and rodents by a bite in the neck or in the head and consumed them completely. They stalked birds quietly, followed by a quick chase and a jump up to a height of and over a distance of , also catching some in the air. They pulled them down to the ground and consumed small birds like Cape clapper lark ("Mirafra apiata") and spike-heeled lark ("Chersomanes albofasciata") without plucking. They plucked large birds like northern black korhaan ("Afrotis afraoides"), ate for several hours, cached the remains in hollows and covered them with sand. Neonate springbok ("Antidorcas marsupialis") lambs keep hiding quietly in a hollow or under a bush for the first few days of their lives. A male pounced on a lamb resting in the grass, but abandoned the hunt after the lamb got up on its feet. It later scavenged the carcass of a recently deceased lamb weighing nearly . It consumed around meat in each of several bouts of eating, starting from the thighs, making its way from the lower back through the flanks to the neck; later it opened up the chest and fed on the inner organs. Insects like harvester termites, grasshoppers and moths constituted about 2% of the prey mass consumed.


title: Black-footed cat

text: Altogether 54 prey species of the black-footed cat were identified, with the gerbil mouse ("Malacothrix typica") being among its most important prey. Its average prey weighs with small mammals constituting the most important prey class, followed by larger mammals weighing more than and small birds.


title: Black-footed cat

text: In captivity, male black-footed cats become sexually mature at the age of nine months, and females at the age of seven months. Their oestrus lasts around 36 hours, and gestation lasts 63 to 68 days. The female gives birth to up to two litters per year between spring and autumn. The litter size is usually one or two kittens, in rare cases also four kittens.


title: Black-footed cat

text: Wild female black-footed cats observed in the wild were receptive to mating for only five to ten hours, requiring males to locate them quickly. Males fight for access to the female. Copulation occurs nearly every twenty to fifty minutes.


title: Black-footed cat

text: Kittens weigh at birth; they are born blind and relatively helpless, although they are able to crawl after just a few hours. Their eyes open at three to ten days, and their deciduous teeth break through at the age of two to three weeks. Within one month, they take solid food, and are weaned at the age of two months. Their permanent teeth erupt at the age of 148 to 158 days.


title: Black-footed cat

text: Captive females were observed trying to shift their kittens to a new hiding place every six to ten days after a week of their birth, much more frequently than other small cats. They are able to walk within two weeks and start climbing at three weeks. In the wild, kittens are born in South African springhare burrows or hollow termite mounds. From the age of four days onward, the mother leaves her kittens alone for up to 10 hours during nights. At the age of six weeks, they can move fast and frequently leave the den. Kittens and independent subadults are at the risk of falling prey to other carnivores such as black-backed jackal ("Canis mesomelas"), caracal ("Caracal caracal") and nocturnal raptors. They become independent after three to four months and tend to stay within their mother's home range. Captive black-footed cats lived for up to 15 years and three months.


title: Black-footed cat

text: Both captive and free-ranging black-footed cats exhibit a high prevalence of AA amyloidosis, which causes chronic inflammatory processes and usually culminates in kidney failure and death. Wild black-footed cats are susceptible to transmission of infectious diseases from domestic dogs and cats.


title: Black-footed cat

text: Known threats include methods of indiscriminate predator control, such as bait poisoning and steel-jaw traps, habitat deterioration from overgrazing, intraguild predation, diseases, declining South African springhare populations, and unsuitable farming practices. Distribution data indicate that the majority of protected areas may be too small to adequately conserve viable sub-populations.


title: Black-footed cat

text: The black-footed cat is included on CITES Appendix I and protected by national legislation across most of its range. Hunting is banned in Botswana and South Africa.


title: Black-footed cat

text: The Black-footed Cat Working Group carries out a research project at Benfontein Nature Reserve and Nuwejaarsfontein Farm near Kimberley, Northern Cape. This project is part of a multidisciplinary effort to study the distribution, ecology, health, and reproduction of the black-footed cat. In November 2012, this project was extended to Biesiesfontein Farm located in the Victoria West area. Between 1992 and 2018, 65 black-footed cats were radio-collared and followed for extended periods to improve the understanding about their social organisation, sizes and use of their home ranges, hunting behaviour and composition of their diet.


title: Black-footed cat

text: Camera traps are used to monitor the behaviour of radio-collared black-footed cats and their interaction with aardwolves ("Proteles cristatus").


title: Black-footed cat

text: The Wuppertal Zoo acquired black-footed cats in 1957, and succeeded in breeding them in 1963. In 1993, the European Endangered Species Programme was formed to coordinate which animals are best suited for pairing to maintain genetic diversity and to avoid inbreeding. The "International Studbook for the Black-footed Cat" was kept in the Wuppertal Zoo in Germany. , detailed records existed for a total of 726 captive cats since 1964; worldwide, 74 individuals were kept in 23 institutions in Germany, United Arab Emirates, US, UK, and South Africa.


title: Black-footed cat

text: Several zoos reported breeding successes, including Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, Fresno Chaffee Zoo, Brookfield Zoo, and Philadelphia Zoo.


title: Black-footed cat

text: The Audubon Nature Institute's Center for Research of Endangered Species is working on advanced genetics involving cats. In February 2011, a female kept there gave birth to two male kittens – the first black-footed cats to be born as a result of fertilization using frozen and thawed sperm and frozen and thawed embryos. In 2003, the sperm was collected from a male and then frozen. It was later combined with an egg from a female, creating embryos in March 2005. Those embryos were frozen for almost six years before being thawed and transferred to a surrogate female in December 2010, which carried the embryos to term, resulting in the birth of the two kittens. The same center reported that on 6 February 2012, a female black-footed cat kitten, Crystal, was born to a domestic cat surrogate after interspecies embryo transfer.


title: Siesta

text: A siesta (from Spanish, pronounced and meaning "nap") is a short nap taken in the early afternoon, often after the midday meal. Such a period of sleep is a common tradition in some countries, particularly those in warm-weather zones. The "siesta" can refer to the nap itself, or more generally to a period of the day, generally between 2 and 5 PM. This period is used for sleep, as well as leisure, mid-day meals, or other activities.


title: Siesta

text: Siestas are historically common throughout the Mediterranean and Southern Europe, the Middle East, mainland China, and the Indian subcontinent. In Southern Italy the siesta is called "controra" (from contro ("counter") + ora "hour"), that is believed as a magical moment of the day, in which the world comes back in possession of ghosts and spirits. The siesta is an old tradition in Spain and, through Spanish influence, most of Latin America. In Dalmatia (coastal Croatia), the traditional afternoon nap is known as "pižolot" (from Venetian "pixolotto"). The Spanish word "siesta" derives originally from the Latin word "hora sexta " "sixth hour" (counting from dawn, hence "midday rest"). In Egypt the mid-afternoon nap is called "taaseela". In Egypt as with other Middle Eastern countries, government workers typically work 6 hours a day, 6 days a week. Due to this schedule, workers do not eat lunch at work, but instead leave work around 2 pm and eat their main meal, which is the heaviest, at lunchtime. Following the heavy lunch, they take a taaseela or nap and have tea upon waking up. For dinner, they usually have a smaller meal.


title: Siesta

text: Factors explaining the geographical distribution of the modern siesta are warm temperatures and heavy intake of food at the midday meal. Combined, these two factors contribute to the feeling of post-lunch drowsiness. In many countries that practice the siesta, the summer heat can be unbearable in the early afternoon, making a midday break at home welcome.


title: Siesta

text: The timing of sleep in humans depends upon a balance between homeostatic sleep propensity, the need for sleep as a function of the amount of time elapsed since the last adequate sleep episode, and circadian rhythms which determine the ideal timing of a correctly structured and restorative sleep episode. The homeostatic pressure to sleep starts growing upon awakening. The circadian signal for wakefulness starts building in the (late) afternoon. As professor of sleep medicine Charles Czeisler notes, "The circadian system is set up in a beautiful way to override the homeostatic drive for sleep."


title: Siesta

text: Thus, in many people, there is a dip when the drive for sleep has been building for hours and the drive for wakefulness has not yet started. This is, again quoting Czeisler, "a great time for a nap". The drive for wakefulness intensifies through the evening, making it difficult to get to sleep 2–3 hours before one's usual bedtime when the "wake maintenance zone" ends.


title: Siesta

text: Taking a long lunch break including a nap is common in a number of Mediterranean, tropical, and subtropical countries. The "Washington Post" of 13 February 2007 reports at length on studies in Greece that indicate that those who nap have less risk of heart attacks.


title: Siesta

text: In the United States, the United Kingdom, and a growing number of other countries, a short sleep has been referred to as a "power nap", a term coined by Cornell University social psychologist James Maas and recognized by other research scientists such as Sara Mednick as well as in the popular press. Siesta is also practiced in some still colder regions, such as Patagonia. The power nap is called "riposo" in Northern Italy and "pennichella" or "pisolino" in Southern Italy.


title: Siesta

text: It used to be the custom in Russia, with Adam Olearius stating such was "the custom of the Countrey, where sleep is as necessary after Dinner as in the Night". One source of hostility toward False Dmitriy I was that he did not "...indulge in the siesta."


title: Siesta

text: Einhard's "Life of Charlemagne" describes the emperor's summertime siestas: "In summer, after his midday meal, he would eat some fruit and take another drink; then he would remove his shoes and undress completely, just as he did at night, and rest for two or three hours."


title: Siesta

text: India has culture of after lunch naps now diminishing with the inroads made by modern western work culture. Yoga advocates a small nap after lunch. It is called "Vam-Kukshi" (literally, lying down on one's left side). Lying on the left side has purported benefits for digestion and preventing food reflux.


title: Siesta

text: In modern Spain, the midday nap during the working week has largely been abandoned among the adult working population. According to a 2009 survey, 16.2 percent of Spaniards polled claimed to take a nap "daily", whereas 22 percent did so "sometimes", 3.2 percent "weekends only" and the remainder, 58.6 percent, "never". The share of those who claimed to have a nap daily had diminished by 7 percent compared to a previous poll in 1998. Nearly three quarters of those who take siesta claimed to do so on the sofa rather than on the bed. The habit is more likely among the elderly or during summer holidays in order to avoid the high temperatures of the day and extend social life until the cooler late evenings and nights.


title: Siesta

text: English-language media often conflates the siesta with the two to three hour lunch break that is characteristic of Spanish working hours, even though the working population is less likely to have time for a siesta and the two events are not necessarily connected. In fact, the average Spaniard works longer hours than almost all their European counterparts (typically 11-hour days, from 9am to 8pm).


title: Siesta

text: As for the origins of the practice in Spain, the scorching summer heat predominant mostly in the South is thought to have motivated those doing agrarian work to take a break to avoid the hottest part of the day and be able to work longer hours when is cooler. In cities, the dismal economic situation in Spain in the post-Spanish Civil War years coincided with the advent of both a modern economy and urbanization. At that time, a long midday break—with or without siesta—was necessary for those commuting between the part-time jobs which were common in the sputtering economy.


title: Siesta

text: The siesta habit has been associated with a 37 percent reduction in coronary mortality, possibly due to reduced cardiovascular stress mediated by daytime sleep.


title: Siesta

text: Epidemiological studies on the relations between cardiovascular health and siesta have led to conflicting conclusions, possibly because of poor control of confounding variables, such as physical activity. It is possible that people who take a siesta have different physical activity habits, for example, waking earlier and scheduling more activity during the morning. Such differences in physical activity may lead to different 24-hour profiles in cardiovascular function. Even if such effects of physical activity can be discounted in explaining the relationship between siesta and cardiovascular health, it is still not known whether the daytime nap itself, a supine posture, or the expectancy of a nap is the most important factor.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Ada is a structured, statically typed, imperative, and object-oriented high-level programming language, extended from Pascal and other languages. It has built-in language support for "design by contract" (DbC), extremely strong typing, explicit concurrency, tasks, synchronous message passing, protected objects, and non-determinism. Ada improves code safety and maintainability by using the compiler to find errors in favor of runtime errors. Ada is an international technical standard, jointly defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). , the standard, called Ada 2012 informally, is ISO/IEC 8652:2012.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Ada was originally designed by a team led by French computer scientist Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull under contract to the United States Department of Defense (DoD) from 1977 to 1983 to supersede over 450 programming languages used by the DoD at that time. Ada was named after Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), who has been credited as the first computer programmer.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Ada was originally designed for embedded and real-time systems. The Ada 95 revision, designed by S. Tucker Taft of Intermetrics between 1992 and 1995, improved support for systems, numerical, financial, and object-oriented programming (OOP).


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Features of Ada include: strong typing, modular programming mechanisms (packages), run-time checking, parallel processing (tasks, synchronous message passing, protected objects, and nondeterministic select statements), exception handling, and generics. Ada 95 added support for object-oriented programming, including dynamic dispatch.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: The syntax of Ada minimizes choices of ways to perform basic operations, and prefers English keywords (such as "or else" and "and then") to symbols (such as "||" and "&&"). Ada uses the basic arithmetical operators "+", "-", "*", and "/", but avoids using other symbols. Code blocks are delimited by words such as "declare", "begin", and "end", where the "end" (in most cases) is followed by the identifier of the block it closes (e.g., "if ... end if", "loop ... end loop"). In the case of conditional blocks this avoids a "dangling else" that could pair with the wrong nested if-expression in other languages like C or Java.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Ada is designed for developing very large software systems. Ada packages can be compiled separately. Ada package specifications (the package interface) can also be compiled separately without the implementation to check for consistency. This makes it possible to detect problems early during the design phase, before implementation starts.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: A large number of compile-time checks are supported to help avoid bugs that would not be detectable until run-time in some other languages or would require explicit checks to be added to the source code. For example, the syntax requires explicitly named closing of blocks to prevent errors due to mismatched end tokens. The adherence to strong typing allows detecting many common software errors (wrong parameters, range violations, invalid references, mismatched types, etc.) either during compile-time, or otherwise during run-time. As concurrency is part of the language specification, the compiler can in some cases detect potential deadlocks. Compilers also commonly check for misspelled identifiers, visibility of packages, redundant declarations, etc. and can provide warnings and useful suggestions on how to fix the error.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Ada also supports run-time checks to protect against access to unallocated memory, buffer overflow errors, range violations, off-by-one errors, array access errors, and other detectable bugs. These checks can be disabled in the interest of runtime efficiency, but can often be compiled efficiently. It also includes facilities to help program verification. For these reasons, Ada is widely used in critical systems, where any anomaly might lead to very serious consequences, e.g., accidental death, injury or severe financial loss. Examples of systems where Ada is used include avionics, air traffic control, railways, banking, military and space technology.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Ada's dynamic memory management is high-level and type-safe. Ada has no generic or untyped pointers; nor does it implicitly declare any pointer type. Instead, all dynamic memory allocation and deallocation must occur via explicitly declared "access types". Each access type has an associated "storage pool" that handles the low-level details of memory management; the programmer can either use the default storage pool or define new ones (this is particularly relevant for Non-Uniform Memory Access). It is even possible to declare several different access types that all designate the same type but use different storage pools. Also, the language provides for "accessibility checks", both at compile time and at run time, that ensures that an "access value" cannot outlive the type of the object it points to.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Though the semantics of the language allow automatic garbage collection of inaccessible objects, most implementations do not support it by default, as it would cause unpredictable behaviour in real-time systems. Ada does support a limited form of region-based memory management; also, creative use of storage pools can provide for a limited form of automatic garbage collection, since destroying a storage pool also destroys all the objects in the pool.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: A double-dash ("--"), resembling an em dash, denotes comment text. Comments stop at end of line, to prevent unclosed comments from accidentally voiding whole sections of source code. Disabling a whole block of code now requires the prefixing of each line (or column) individually with "--". While clearly denoting disabled code with a column of repeated "--" down the page this renders the experimental dis/re-enablement of large blocks a more drawn out process.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: The semicolon (";") is a statement terminator, and the null or no-operation statement is codice_1. A single codice_2 without a statement to terminate is not allowed.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Unlike most ISO standards, the Ada language definition (known as the "Ada Reference Manual" or "ARM", or sometimes the "Language Reference Manual" or "LRM") is free content. Thus, it is a common reference for Ada programmers, not only programmers implementing Ada compilers. Apart from the reference manual, there is also an extensive rationale document which explains the language design and the use of various language constructs. This document is also widely used by programmers. When the language was revised, a new rationale document was written.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: One notable free software tool that is used by many Ada programmers to aid them in writing Ada source code is the GNAT Programming Studio, and GNAT which is part of the GNU Compiler Collection.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: In the 1970s the US Department of Defense (DoD) became concerned by the number of different programming languages being used for its embedded computer system projects, many of which were obsolete or hardware-dependent, and none of which supported safe modular programming. In 1975, a working group, the High Order Language Working Group (HOLWG), was formed with the intent to reduce this number by finding or creating a programming language generally suitable for the department's and the UK Ministry of Defence's requirements. After many iterations beginning with an original Straw man proposal the eventual programming language was named Ada. The total number of high-level programming languages in use for such projects fell from over 450 in 1983 to 37 by 1996.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: HOLWG crafted the Steelman language requirements, a series of documents stating the requirements they felt a programming language should satisfy. Many existing languages were formally reviewed, but the team concluded in 1977 that no existing language met the specifications.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Requests for proposals for a new programming language were issued and four contractors were hired to develop their proposals under the names of Red (Intermetrics led by Benjamin Brosgol), Green (CII Honeywell Bull, led by Jean Ichbiah), Blue (SofTech, led by John Goodenough) and Yellow (SRI International, led by Jay Spitzen). In April 1978, after public scrutiny, the Red and Green proposals passed to the next phase. In May 1979, the Green proposal, designed by Jean Ichbiah at CII Honeywell Bull, was chosen and given the name Ada—after Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace. This proposal was influenced by the language LIS that Ichbiah and his group had developed in the 1970s. The preliminary Ada reference manual was published in ACM SIGPLAN Notices in June 1979. The Military Standard reference manual was approved on December 10, 1980 (Ada Lovelace's birthday), and given the number MIL-STD-1815 in honor of Ada Lovelace's birth year. In 1981, C. A. R. Hoare took advantage of his Turing Award speech to criticize Ada for being overly complex and hence unreliable, but subsequently seemed to recant in the foreword he wrote for an Ada textbook.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Ada attracted much attention from the programming community as a whole during its early days. Its backers and others predicted that it might become a dominant language for general purpose programming and not only defense-related work. Ichbiah publicly stated that within ten years, only two programming languages would remain: Ada and Lisp. Early Ada compilers struggled to implement the large, complex language, and both compile-time and run-time performance tended to be slow and tools primitive. Compiler vendors expended most of their efforts in passing the massive, language-conformance-testing, government-required Ada Compiler Validation Capability (ACVC) validation suite that was required in another novel feature of the Ada language effort. The Jargon File, a dictionary of computer hacker slang originating in 1975–1983, notes in an entry on Ada that "it is precisely what one might expect given that kind of endorsement by fiat; designed by committee...difficult to use, and overall a disastrous, multi-billion-dollar boondoggle...Ada Lovelace...would almost certainly blanch at the use her name has been latterly put to; the kindest thing that has been said about it is that there is probably a good small language screaming to get out from inside its vast, elephantine bulk."


title: Ada (programming language)

text: The first validated Ada implementation was the NYU Ada/Ed translator, certified on April 11, 1983. NYU Ada/Ed is implemented in the high-level set language SETL. Several commercial companies began offering Ada compilers and associated development tools, including Alsys, TeleSoft, DDC-I, Advanced Computer Techniques, Tartan Laboratories, Irvine Compiler, TLD Systems, and Verdix. Computer manufacturers who had a significant business in the defense, aerospace, or related industries, also offered Ada compilers and tools on their platforms; these included Concurrent Computer Corporation, Cray Research, Inc., Harris Computer Systems, and Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: In 1991, the US Department of Defense began to require the use of Ada (the "Ada mandate") for all software, though exceptions to this rule were often granted. The Department of Defense Ada mandate was effectively removed in 1997, as the DoD began to embrace commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology. Similar requirements existed in other NATO countries: Ada was required for NATO systems involving command and control and other functions, and Ada was the mandated or preferred language for defense-related applications in countries such as Sweden, Germany, and Canada.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: By the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ada compilers had improved in performance, but there were still barriers to fully exploiting Ada's abilities, including a tasking model that was different from what most real-time programmers were used to.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Because of Ada's safety-critical support features, it is now used not only for military applications, but also in commercial projects where a software bug can have severe consequences, e.g., avionics and air traffic control, commercial rockets such as the Ariane 4 and 5, satellites and other space systems, railway transport and banking.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: For example, the Airplane Information Management System, the fly-by-wire system software in the Boeing 777, was written in Ada. Developed by Honeywell Air Transport Systems in collaboration with consultants from DDC-I, it became arguably the best-known of any Ada project, civilian or military. The Canadian Automated Air Traffic System was written in 1 million lines of Ada (SLOC count). It featured advanced distributed processing, a distributed Ada database, and object-oriented design. Ada is also used in other air traffic systems, e.g., the UK's next-generation Interim Future Area Control Tools Support () air traffic control system is designed and implemented using SPARK Ada.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: It is also used in the French TVM in-cab signalling system on the TGV high-speed rail system, and the metro suburban trains in Paris, London, Hong Kong and New York City.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Ada was first published in 1980 as an ANSI standard ANSI/MIL-STD 1815. As this very first version held many errors and inconsistencies (see Summary of Ada Language Changes), the revised edition was published in 1983 as ANSI/MIL-STD 1815A. Without any further changes, it became an ISO standard in 1987, ISO 8652:1987. This version of the language is commonly known as Ada 83, from the date of its adoption by ANSI, but is sometimes referred to also as Ada 87, from the date of its adoption by ISO. This is the Ada 83 Reference Manual. There is also a French translation; DIN translated it into German as DIN 66268 in 1988.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Ada 95, the joint ISO/IEC/ANSI standard ISO/IEC 8652:1995 (see Ada 95 RM) was published in February 1995, making it the first ISO standard object-oriented programming language. To help with the standard revision and future acceptance, the US Air Force funded the development of the GNAT Compiler. Presently, the GNAT Compiler is part of the GNU Compiler Collection.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Work has continued on improving and updating the technical content of the Ada language. A Technical Corrigendum to Ada 95 was published in October 2001, ISO/IEC 8652:1995/Corr 1:2001 (see Ada 95 RM with TC 1), and a major Amendment, ISO/IEC 8652:1995/Amd 1:2007 (see Ada 2005 RM) was published on March 9, 2007, commonly known as Ada 2005 because work on the new standard was finished that year.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: At the Ada-Europe 2012 conference in Stockholm, the Ada Resource Association (ARA) and Ada-Europe announced the completion of the design of the latest version of the Ada language and the submission of the reference manual to the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 9 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) for approval. ISO/IEC 8652:2012 (see Ada 2012 RM) was published in December 2012, known as Ada 2012. A technical corrigendum was published ISO/IEC 8652:2012/COR 1:2016 (see RM 2012 with TC 1).


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Despite the names Ada 83, 95 etc., legally there is only one Ada standard, the one of the last ISO/IEC standard: with the acceptance of a new standard version, the previous one becomes withdrawn. The other names are just informal ones referencing a certain edition.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Other related standards include ISO/IEC 8651-3:1988 "Information processing systems—Computer graphics—Graphical Kernel System (GKS) language bindings—Part 3: Ada".


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Ada is an ALGOL-like programming language featuring control structures with reserved words such as "if", "then", "else", "while", "for", and so on. However, Ada also has many data structuring facilities and other abstractions which were not included in the original ALGOL 60, such as type definitions, records, pointers, enumerations. Such constructs were in part inherited from or inspired by Pascal.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Ada's type system is not based on a set of predefined primitive types but allows users to declare their own types. This declaration in turn is not based on the internal representation of the type but on describing the goal which should be achieved. This allows the compiler to determine a suitable memory size for the type, and to check for violations of the type definition at compile time and run time (i.e., range violations, buffer overruns, type consistency, etc.). Ada supports numerical types defined by a range, modulo types, aggregate types (records and arrays), and enumeration types. Access types define a reference to an instance of a specified type; untyped pointers are not permitted.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Important to note: Day_type, Month_type, Year_type, Hours are incompatible types, meaning that for instance the following expression is illegal:


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Types can have modifiers such as "limited, abstract, private" etc. Private types do not show their inner structure; objects of limited types cannot be copied. Ada 95 adds further features for object-oriented extension of types.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Ada is a structured programming language, meaning that the flow of control is structured into standard statements. All standard constructs and deep-level early exit are supported, so the use of the also supported "go to" commands is seldom needed.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: This program can be compiled, e.g., by using the freely available open-source compiler GNAT, by executing


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Packages, procedures and functions can nest to any depth, and each can also be the logical outermost block.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Each package, procedure or function can have its own declarations of constants, types, variables, and other procedures, functions and packages, which can be declared in any order.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Ada has language support for task-based concurrency. The fundamental concurrent unit in Ada is a "task", which is a built-in limited type. Tasks are specified in two parts – the task declaration defines the task interface (similar to a type declaration), the task body specifies the implementation of the task. Depending on the implementation, Ada tasks are either mapped to operating system threads or processes, or are scheduled internally by the Ada runtime.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Tasks can have entries for synchronisation (a form of synchronous message passing). Task entries are declared in the task specification. Each task entry can have one or more "accept" statements within the task body. If the control flow of the task reaches an accept statement, the task is blocked until the corresponding entry is called by another task (similarly, a calling task is blocked until the called task reaches the corresponding accept statement). Task entries can have parameters similar to procedures, allowing tasks to synchronously exchange data. In conjunction with "select" statements it is possible to define "guards" on accept statements (similar to Dijkstra's guarded commands).


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Ada also offers "protected objects" for mutual exclusion. Protected objects are a monitor-like construct, but use guards instead of conditional variables for signaling (similar to conditional critical regions). Protected objects combine the data encapsulation and safe mutual exclusion from monitors, and entry guards from conditional critical regions. The main advantage over classical monitors is that conditional variables are not required for signaling, avoiding potential deadlocks due to incorrect locking semantics. Like tasks, the protected object is a built-in limited type, and it also has a declaration part and a body.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: A protected object consists of encapsulated private data (which can only be accessed from within the protected object), and procedures, functions and entries which are guaranteed to be mutually exclusive (with the only exception of functions, which are required to be side effect free and can therefore run concurrently with other functions). A task calling a protected object is blocked if another task is currently executing inside the same protected object, and released when this other task leaves the protected object. Blocked tasks are queued on the protected object ordered by time of arrival.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Protected object entries are similar to procedures, but additionally have "guards". If a guard evaluates to false, a calling task is blocked and added to the queue of that entry; now another task can be admitted to the protected object, as no task is currently executing inside the protected object. Guards are re-evaluated whenever a task leaves the protected object, as this is the only time when the evaluation of guards can have changed.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Calls to entries can be "requeued" to other entries with the same signature. A task that is requeued is blocked and added to the queue of the target entry; this means that the protected object is released and allows admission of another task.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: The "select" statement in Ada can be used to implement non-blocking entry calls and accepts, non-deterministic selection of entries (also with guards), time-outs and aborts.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: A pragma is a compiler directive that conveys information to the compiler to allow specific manipulating of compiled output. Certain pragmas are built into the language, while others are implementation-specific.


title: Ada (programming language)

text: Examples of common usage of compiler pragmas would be to disable certain features, such as run-time type checking or array subscript boundary checking, or to instruct the compiler to insert object code instead of a function call (as C/C++ does with inline functions).


title: Prince

text: A prince is a male ruler (ranked below a king, grand prince, and grand duke) or a male member of a monarch's or former monarch's family. "Prince" is also a title of nobility (often highest), often hereditary, in some European states. The female equivalent is a princess. The English word derives, via the French word "prince", from the Latin noun , from (first) and (head), meaning "the first, foremost, the chief, most distinguished, noble ruler, prince".


title: Prince

text: The Latin word (older Latin *prīsmo-kaps, literally "the one who takes the first [place/position]"), became the usual title of the informal leader of the Roman senate some centuries before the transition to empire, the "princeps senatus".


title: Prince

text: Emperor Augustus established the formal position of monarch on the basis of principate, not dominion. He also tasked his grandsons as summer rulers of the city when most of the government were on holiday in the country or attending religious rituals, and, for that task, granted them the title of princeps.


title: Prince

text: The original but now less common use of the word was the application of the Latin word "", from late Roman law and the classical system of government that eventually gave way to the European feudal society. In this sense, a prince is a ruler of a territory that is sovereign or quasi-sovereign, i.e., exercising substantial (though not all) prerogatives associated with monarchs of independent nations, such as the immediate states within the historical boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire. In medieval and Early Modern Europe, there were as many as two hundred such territories, especially in Italy, Germany, and Gaelic Ireland. In this sense, "prince" is used of any and all rulers, regardless of actual title or precise rank. This is the Renaissance use of the term found in Niccolò Machiavelli's famous work, "Il Principe". It is also used in this sense in the United States Declaration of Independence.


title: Prince

text: As a title, by the end of the medieval era, "prince" was borne by rulers of territories that were either substantially smaller than those of or exercised fewer of the rights of sovereignty than did emperors and kings. A lord of even a quite small territory might come to be referred to as a "prince" before the 13th century, either from translations of a native title into the Latin "" (as for the hereditary ruler of Wales) or when the lord's territory was allodial. The lord of an allodium owned his lands and exercised prerogatives over the subjects in his territory absolutely, owing no feudal homage or duty as a vassal to a liege lord, nor being subject to any higher jurisdiction. Most small territories designated as principalities during feudal eras were allodial, e.g. the Princedom of Dombes.


title: Prince

text: Lords who exercised lawful authority over territories and people within a feudal hierarchy were also sometimes regarded as "princes" in the general sense, especially if they held the rank of count or higher. This is attested in some surviving styles for e.g., British earls, marquesses, and dukes are still addressed by the Crown on ceremonial occasions as "high and noble princes" (cf. Royal and noble styles).


title: Prince

text: In parts of the Holy Roman Empire in which primogeniture did not prevail (e.g., Germany), all legitimate agnates had an equal right to the family's hereditary titles. While offices such as emperor, king, and elector could only be legally occupied by one dynast at a time, holders of such other titles as duke, margrave, landgrave, count palatine, and prince could only differentiate themselves by adding the name of their appanage to the family's original title. This tended to proliferate unwieldy titles (e.g. Princess Katherine of Anhalt-Zerbst; Karl, Count Palatine of Zweibrücken-Neukastell-Kleeburg; or Prince Christian Charles of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Plön-Norburg) and, as agnatic primogeniture gradually became the norm in the Holy Roman Empire by the end of the 18th century, another means of distinguishing the monarch from other members of his dynasty became necessary. Gradual substitution of the title of "Prinz" for the monarch's title of "Fürst" occurred, and became customary for cadets in all German dynasties except in the grand duchies of Mecklenburg and Oldenburg. Both and "" are translated into English as "prince", but they reflect not only different but mutually exclusive concepts.


title: Prince

text: This distinction had evolved before the 18th century (although Liechtenstein long remained an exception, with cadets and females using into the 19th century) for dynasties headed by a "Fürst" in Germany. The custom spread through the Continent to such an extent that a renowned imperial general who belonged to a cadet branch of a reigning ducal family, remains best known to history by the generic dynastic title, "Prince Eugene of Savoy". Note that the princely title was used as a prefix to his Christian name, which also became customary.


title: Prince

text: Cadets of France's other affected similar usage under the Bourbon kings. Always facing the scepticism of Saint-Simon and like-minded courtiers, these quasi-royal aristocrats' assumption of the princely title as a personal, rather than territorial, designation encountered some resistance. In writing "Histoire Genealogique et Chonologique", Père Anselme accepts that, by the end of the 17th century, the heir apparent to the House of La Tour d'Auvergne's sovereign duchy bears the title "Prince de Bouillon", but he would record in 1728 that the heir's "La Tour" cousin, the Count of Oliergues, is ""known as" the Prince Frederick" (""dit" le prince Frédéric").


title: Prince

text: The post-medieval rank of (princely count) embraced but elevated the German equivalent of the intermediate French, English and Spanish nobles. In the Holy Roman Empire, these nobles rose to dynastic status by preserving from the Imperial crown ( after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648) the exercise of such sovereign prerogatives as the minting of money; the muster of military troops and the right to wage war and contract treaties; local judicial authority and constabulary enforcement; and the habit of inter-marrying with sovereign dynasties. By the 19th century, cadets of a ' would become known as '.


title: Prince

text: The husband of a queen regnant is usually titled "prince consort" or simply "prince", whereas the wives of male monarchs take the female equivalent (e.g., empress, queen) of their husband's title. In Brazil, Portugal and Spain, however, the husband of a female monarch is accorded the masculine equivalent of her title (e.g., emperor, king), at least after he fathered her heir. In previous epochs, husbands of queens regnant were often deemed entitled to the crown matrimonial, sharing their consorts' regnal title and rank .


title: Prince

text: However, in cultures which allow the ruler to have several wives (e.g., four in Islam) or official concubines (e.g., Imperial China, Ottoman Empire, Thailand, KwaZulu-Natal), these women, sometimes collectively referred to as a harem, often have specific rules determining their relative hierarchy and a variety of titles, which may distinguish between those whose offspring can be in line for the succession or not, or specifically who is mother to the heir to the throne.


title: Prince

text: To complicate matters, the style "His/Her (Imperial/Royal) Highness", a prefix often accompanying the title of a dynastic prince, may be awarded/withheld separately (as a compromise or consolation prize, in some sense, e.g., Duke of Cádiz, Duchess of Windsor, Princesse de Réthy, Prince d'Orléans-Braganza).


title: Prince

text: Although the arrangement set out above is the one that is most commonly understood, there are also different systems. Depending on country, epoch, and translation, other usages of "prince" are possible.


title: Prince

text: Foreign-language titles such as , , , (non-reigning descendant of a reigning monarch), , etc., are usually translated as "prince" in English.


title: Prince

text: Some princely titles are derived from those of national rulers, such as tsarevich from tsar. Other examples are (all using the Persian patronymic suffix "-zada", meaning "son, descendant"). However, some princely titles develop in unusual ways, such as adoption of a style for dynasts which is not pegged to the ruler's title, but rather continues an old tradition (e.g., "grand duke" in Romanov Russia or "archduke" in Habsburg Austria), claims dynastic succession to a lost monarchy (e.g. for the La Trémoïlle heirs to the Neapolitan throne), or descends from a ruler whose princely title or sovereign status was not de jure hereditary, but attributed to descendants as an international courtesy, (e.g., Bibesco-Bassaraba de Brancovan, Poniatowski, Ypsilanti).


title: Prince

text: In some dynasties, a specific style other than prince has become customary for dynasts, such as in the House of Capet, and . was borne by children of the monarch other than the heir apparent in all of the Iberian monarchies. Some monarchies used a specific princely title for their heirs, such as Prince of Asturias in Spain and Prince of Brazil in Portugal.


title: Prince

text: Sometimes a specific title is commonly used by various dynasties in a region, e.g. Mian in various of the Punjabi princely Hill States (lower Himalayan region in British India).


title: Prince

text: European dynasties usually awarded appanages to princes of the blood, typically attached to a feudal noble title, such as Prince of Orange in the Netherlands, Britain's royal dukes, the in France, the Count of Flanders in Belgium, and the Count of Syracuse in Sicily. Sometimes appanage titles were princely, e.g. Prince of Achaia (Courtenay), (Bourbon), Prince of Carignan (Savoy), but it was the fact that their owners were of princely "rank" rather than that they held a princely "title" which was the source of their pre-eminence.


title: Prince

text: Other princes derive their title not from dynastic membership as such, but from inheritance of a title named for a specific and historical territory. The family's possession of prerogatives or properties in that territory might be long past. Such were most of the "princedoms" of France's "ancien régime", so resented for their pretentiousness in the memoirs of Saint-Simon. These included the princedoms of Arches-Charleville, Boisbelle-Henrichemont, Chalais, Château-Regnault, Guéménée, Martigues, Mercœur, Sedan, Talmond, Tingrey, and the "kingship" of Yvetot, among others.


title: Prince

text: A prince or princess who is the head of state of a territory that has a monarchy as a form of government is a reigning prince.


title: Prince

text: In the same tradition, some self-proclaimed monarchs of so-called micronations style themselves as princes:


title: Prince

text: Various monarchies provide for different modes in which princes of the dynasty can temporarily or permanently share in the style and/or office of the monarch, e.g. as regent or viceroy.


title: Prince

text: Though these offices may not be reserved legally for members of the ruling dynasty, in some traditions they are filled by dynasts, a fact which may be reflected in the style of the office, e.g. "prince-president" for Napoleon III as French head of state but not yet emperor, or "prince-lieutenant" in Luxembourg, repeatedly filled by the crown prince before the grand duke's abdication, or in form of .


title: Prince

text: Some monarchies even have a practice in which the monarch can formally abdicate in favour of his heir and yet retain a kingly title with executive power, e.g. "Maha Upayuvaraja" (Sanskrit for "Great Joint King" in Cambodia), though sometimes also conferred on powerful regents who exercised executive powers.


title: Prince

text: In several countries of the European continent, such as France, prince can be an aristocratic title of someone having a high rank of nobility or as lord of a significant fief, but not ruling any actual territory and without any necessary link to the royal family, which makes it difficult to compare with the British system of royal princes.


title: Prince

text: The kings of France started to bestow the style of prince, as a title among the nobility, from the 16th century onwards. These titles were created by elevating a to the nominal status of a principality—although prerogatives of sovereignty were never conceded in the letters patent. Princely titles self-assumed by the and by the were generally tolerated by the king and used at the royal court, outside the Parlement of Paris. These titles held no official place in the hierarchy of the nobility, but were often treated as ranking just below ducal peerages, since they were often inherited (or assumed) by ducal heirs:


title: Prince

text: This can even occur in a monarchy within which an identical but real and substantive feudal title exists, such as "" in German. An example of this is:


title: Prince

text: In other cases, such titular princedoms are created in chief of an event, such as a treaty or a victory. Examples include:


title: Prince

text: In the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the titles of prince dated either to the times before the Union of Lublin or were granted to Polish nobles by foreign monarchs, as the law in Poland forbade the king from dividing nobility by granting them hereditary titles: see The Princely Houses of Poland.


title: Prince

text: In the Russian system, (), translated as "prince", is the highest degree of official nobility. Members of older dynasties, whose realms were eventually annexed to the Russian Empire, were also accorded the title of '—sometimes after first being allowed to use the higher title of tsarevich (e.g. the Princes Gruzinsky and Sibirsky). The many surviving branches of the Rurik dynasty used the ' title before and after they yielded sovereignty to their kinsmen, the Grand Princes of Muscovy, who became Tsars and, under the House of Romanov, Emperors of Russia.


title: Prince

text: In each case, the title is followed (when available) by the female form and then (not always available, and obviously rarely applicable to a prince of the blood without a principality) the name of the territory associated with it, each separated by a slash. If a second title (or set) is also given, then that one is for a Prince of the blood, the first for a principality. Be aware that the absence of a separate title for a prince of the blood may not always mean no such title exists; alternatively, the existence of a word does not imply there is also a reality in the linguistic territory concerned; it may very well be used exclusively to render titles in other languages, regardless whether there is a historical link with any (which often means that linguistic tradition is adopted)


title: Prince

text: Etymologically, we can discern the following traditions (some languages followed a historical link, e.g. within the Holy Roman Empire, not their language family; some even fail to follow the same logic for certain other aristocratic titles):


title: Prince

text: In Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Russia, Spain and Hungary the title of "prince" has also been used as the highest title of nobility (without membership in a ruling dynasty), above the title of "duke", while the same usage (then as "Fürst") has occurred in Germany and Austria but then one rank below the title of "duke" and above "count".


title: Prince

text: The above is essentially the story of European, Christian dynasties and other nobility, also 'exported' to their colonial and other overseas territories and otherwise adopted by rather westernized societies elsewhere (e.g. Haiti).


title: Prince

text: Applying these essentially western concepts, and terminology, to other cultures even when they don't do so, is common but in many respects rather dubious. Different (historical, religious...) backgrounds have also begot significantly different dynastic and nobiliary systems, which are poorly represented by the 'closest' western analogy.