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Hmm, that's correct. Today, in fact. I didn't realize.

However, this PDF (the top result for Al-Karaji congruent -trillion) does support the edit:

A congruent number k is an integer for which there exists a square such that the sum and difference of that square with k are themselves squares.

Considering the average American's lack of basic understanding of science and mathematics compared to nearly every other developed country

I hate to go [citation needed] on you but I'd really like to see your data.

So far my googling managed to find:
http://nces.ed.gov/timss/table07_1.asp
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0930085.html
http://imo.math.ca/results/CRBY.html

Strangely the boundary between 2 faces is actually shared by 3 faces. Here's a figure of it. See for example how the edge "g" is a boundary between faces IV and V, faces V and VI, and faces VI and IV.

One part of Serre's conjectures was proved some time ago by Ribet and Edixhoven, and this was used as part of the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. I have found on the web that the recent proof of some cases of Serre's conjecture is currently being explained by Edixhoven in two talks "On Serre's conjecture in level one [Khare, Wintenberger, Dieulefait]", at: www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~gabor/geom_sem.html, and by Ribet in: "The modularity of some mod p Galois representations": "I will sketch the main ideas of recent preprints of Khare-Wintenberger and Dieulefait that allow one to establish certain cases of Serre's conjectures", at: http://www.cms.math.ca/Events/summer05/abs/Plenm.h tml

This case of Serre's conjecture gives another proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, independent of the proof of the "Taniyama-Shimura conjecture for elliptic curves", proved by Wiles (but the proof uses similar tools).
You can look at Ken Ribet's abstract on this in:

http://www.cms.math.ca/Events/summer05/abs/Plenm.h tml

High tech is mature - why spend on basic research?

High tech is currently mature? I'm sure our children and grandchildren will disagree if we give them the chance.

We should spend on basic research because it provides the foundations for the applied research. Sure, we might have enough "basic material" to go on for a while, but eventually, we're going to need more. We could wait until we need to do more basic research, but there will be a delay and then we'll stagnate for a while. Rather than stagnate, let's keep momentum, or at least try to not stagnate as much.

You're suggesting we live off the fruits of our parents and grandparents basic research labor while not contributing anything for our children and grandchildren.

Do you listen to CDs? Do you ever store data on CDs? Do you watch DVDs? Do you ever store data on DVDs?

If so, then you benefit from basic research that was done over the last few hundred years. If for nothing else, we should spend on basic research for the same reasons that we appreciate people having done basic research in the past: basic research provides the foundations for applied research which provides the deliverables.

Anybody who questions the value of basic research should read this:

http://camel.math.ca/vault/future/moody/moody.html

If everybody just bought off-the-shelf components instead of trying to come up with something new, we'd still be listening to music on a wax cylinder and watching B&W silent movies, or worse.

Personally, I'm very glad SONY and Philips decided to not continue buying off-the-shelf.

I'm sorry but I think the Iranians have capable developers that can full and quickly grasp all the subsystems of Linux. With state funding it is not hard to get top notch developers working on their own flavor of Linux. It doesn't take a genius to manage code change either. It's a simple get latest, inspect the changes made and incorporate the change into your codebase. I would also like to point out that a large percentage of engineers in the IT field are foreign born. You underestimate the competence of the world outside your own. Might also want to note that Iran is one the better nations in terms of mathematics even with its limited resources.

It's not true that all math you can teach in high school which is not calculus is "lower level" or "remedial." Many colleges offer alternatives to calculus for non-science majors which study game theory, cryptography, the engravings of M.C. Escher... None of these topics require calculus, but they do require (and hence reinforce the usefulness of) algebra. They are extremely interesting and sophisticated. They could easily be taught in high school as well.

Whatever happened to solid geometry (i.e. polyhedra, spherical trigonometry, etc.)? That's what used to be taught at the senior level of high school. And now students in vector calculus have trouble thinking spatially. Projective and hyperbolic geometries can be taught at the high school level, too.

The more college-level courses are brought down to high school, the more very good high school-level courses are eliminated. And I think this acceleration (and the according logic that math is a one-way street from addition to calculus) is detrimental to the nation's mathematical character. We don't lose the International Math Olympiad every year because we're not getting to calculus fast enough. We're losing because we don't teach enough math prior to calculus.