Mendeleev Uniformity

In today's time and age, humans must be able to handle the large amounts of information that we receive each day. To make sense of our surroundings, humans as complex animals find simple ways to process and store this information. One the most common ways that we sort information is through uniformities. According to the Oxford dictionary, uniform is defined to be “the state of remaining the same in all cases and at all times” Uniformity allows us the luxury of easy processing and quick conclusions, however, our tendency to seek uniformities may also be the cause of loss of knowledge. Amongst the areas of knowledge that provide evidence of this phenomenon, I have chosen to focus on the areas of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. Through the

Mendeleev is known as the man behind the creation of the modern periodic table. In 1869, he published the periodic table by arranging the elements according to their atomic weights. However, at that time not all the elements we know of today had been discovered. Mendeleev filled the periodic table with the elements and left spaces for the ones that had not been discovered yet. Using the assumption of uniformity in chemical characteristics, he was able to accurately predict the properties of the unknown elements as well. The elements for which he had left spaces were all discovered within 15 years of Mendeleev’s periodic table being published. Yet again, the assumption of the existence of uniformity furthered the boundaries of knowledge. The modern periodic table that is used today (slightly varied from the one that Mendeleev proposed) forms the fundamentals of every chemistry student’s knowledge. As a chemistry student myself, I am still amazed at how human logic drove us to arrange a set of elements -that otherwise could have been arranged any other way- on the basis of simple predictable

He had concluded that the sum was -1/12. One of the first laws of mathematics that we learn is that the sum of two or more positive integers is larger than both the integers. Therefore, Ramanujan’s conclusions were surprising as we would expect that the sum of infinite natural numbers would be positive and large based on the laws that apply to positive integers. However, Ramanujan’s methods show that the sum of infinite natural numbers is in fact less than