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Aesop's moral on success

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2021

Edward J. Allen
Edward J. Allen*
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409-1042 USA, e-mail: edward.allen@ttu.edu
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Extract

Aesop's Fables is an enduring collection of short stories with morals that is credited to Aesop, a slave who lived in early Ancient Greece about 2600 years ago. Undoubtedly many later ancient Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras, Socrates, Aristotle and Archimedes were told Aesop's fables in their youth. In a race described in ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’, one of the most famous of Aesop's fables, a tortoise, running in a steady constant manner, beats a hare that is racing irregularly. The lesson of the fable is often interpreted as ‘slow but steady wins the race’ or ‘consistent, effective effort leads to success’ (see [1]) and is applicable to many human activities. The fable illustrates the general problem of working toward an objective when the rate of work is either constant or varies randomly.

Type
Articles
Information
The Mathematical Gazette , Volume 105 , Issue 564 , November 2021 , pp. 481 - 489
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Copyright
© The Mathematical Association 2021

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