History feed
1636
Harvard was founded in 1636, before Newton and Leibniz developed modern calculus in the later seventeenth century. The comparison concerns calculus as a unified mathematical method, not the much older ideas that helped make it possible.
2,500
Cleopatra lived closer to the 1969 Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid. The pyramid was already about 2,500 years old when she was born.
4,000
A surviving population of woolly mammoths lived on Wrangel Island while Egyptians were building the Great Pyramid. These Arctic animals persisted until about 4,000 years ago, long after most mainland populations disappeared.