Alcatraz Island

The island had little vegetation and was a seabird habitat when it was explored in 1775 by Lieutenant Juan Manuel de Ayala, who named it Isla de los Alcatraces (�Isle of the Pelicans�). Sold in 1849 to the U.S. government, Alcatraz has the distinction of being the site of the first

Par�

Estado (state) of northern Brazil through which the lower Amazon River flows to the sea. It is bounded to the north by Guyana, Suriname, and the Brazilian state of Amap�, to the northeast by the Atlantic Ocean, to the east by the Brazilian states of Maranh�o and Tocantins, to the south by Mato Grosso, and to the west by Amazonas. It is the second largest state in Brazil. The capital

Fibonacci Numbers

The elements of the sequence of numbers 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, , each of which, after the second, is the sum of the two previous numbers. These numbers were first noted by the medieval Italian mathematician Leonardo Pisano (�Fibonacci�) in his Liber abaci (1202; �Book of the Abacus�), which also popularized Hindu-Arabic numerals and the decimal number system in Europe. For information on the interesting