rally or rallye Automobile competition using public roads and ordi¬ nary traffic rules. The object is to maintain a specified average speed between checkpoints; the route is unknown to the driver and navigator until the start of the event. Such competition began in 1907 with a Beijing- to-Paris event (12,000 km [7,500 mi]). The Monte-Carlo rally began in 1911. The Paris-Dakar (Senegal) Rally (15,000 km (9,300 mi]) is con¬ sidered one of the most grueling rally events.
Rally for the Republic (RPR) or Gaullists Former French politi¬ cal party. It was founded by Jacques Chirac in 1976 as the successor to the various Gaullist coalitions that dominated the political life of the Fifth Republic under Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou. The party had its antecedents in the group Rally of the French People, organized by de Gaulle in 1947. It evolved into the Union for the New Republic (1958— 62) and then the Union of Democrats for the New Republic (1968-76) before assuming the name Rally for the Republic. In 2002 the party merged with the Liberal Democratic party and much of the Union for the French Democracy to form the Union for a Popular Movement.
ram Projection fixed to the front end of a fighting vessel and designed to damage enemy ships struck by it. It may have been developed by the Egyptians as early as 1200 bc, but it was most commonly used on Phoe¬ nician, Greek, and Roman galleys. It was briefly revived in the mid-19th century, notably in the American Civil War, when rams mounted on armored, steam-driven warships were used effectively against wooden sailing ships. Improvements in naval weaponry and the spread of metal¬ hulled ships soon made it obsolete again. See also battering ram.
RAM Vram\ in full random-access memory Computer main memory in which specific contents can be accessed (read or written) directly by the CPU in a very short time regardless of the sequence (and hence location) in which they were recorded. Two types of memory are possible with random-access circuits, static RAM (SRAM) and dynamic RAM (DRAM). A single memory chip is made up of several million memory cells. In a SRAM chip, each memory cell stores a binary digit (1 or 0) for as long as power is supplied. In a DRAM chip, the charge on individual memory cells must be refreshed periodically in order to retain data. Because it has fewer components, DRAM requires less chip area than SRAM; hence a DRAM chip can hold more memory, though its access time is slower.
Rama Major Hindu deity. The name became associated with Ramacan- dra, the seventh incarnation of Vishnu, whose story is told in the Rama- yana. Conceived as a model of reason, virtue, and right action, Rama was one of the chief objects of the bhakti cults. He is often depicted as a stand¬ ing figure, holding an arrow in his right hand and a bow in his left. In temples his image is attended by the figures of his wife, SlTA, his half brother, Laksmana, and the monkey general, Hanuman.
Rama IV See Mongkut Rama V See Chulalongkorn Rama VI See Vajiravudh Rama IX See Bhumibol Adulyadej
Ramadan \ra-ma-'dan\ In Islam, a holy month of fasting, the ninth month of the Muslim year, commemorating the revelation of the Qur’an to Muhammad. As an act of atonement, Muslims are required to fast and abstain from sexual activity during the daylight hours of Ramadan. Deter¬ mined according to the lunar calendar, Ramadan can fall in any season of the year. The Ramadan fast is considered one of the Five Pillars of Islam, and the end of the fast is celebrated as one of the important reli¬ gious holidays of Islam.
Ramakrishna (Paramahamsa) orig. Gadadhar Chatto- padhyaya (b. Feb. 18, 1836, Hooghly, Bengal state, India—d. Aug. 16, 1886, Calcutta) Indian mystic. Born into a poor Brahman family, he worked as a priest in a temple of Kali in Calcutta (now Kolkata), where
he had a vision and commenced spiritual practices in a number of differ¬ ent religious traditions. He denounced sexual desire and money as the twin evils that put spiritual enlightenment beyond reach, rejected the caste sys¬ tem, and held that all religions are in essence the same and that all are true. His teachings were spread by his disciples, notably Vivekananda. A religious order bearing his name, with headquarters in Kolkata, sends missionaries throughout the world.
Raman Vra-msnV Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata (b. Nov. 7, 1888, Trichinopoly, India—d. Nov. 21, 1970, Bangalore) Indian physicist influential in the growth of science in India. He received a Nobel Prize in 1930 for discovering that when light passes through a transparent mate¬ rial, some of the light that emerges at a right angle to the original beam is of other frequencies (Raman frequencies) characteristic of the material. He contributed to the building up of nearly every Indian research insti¬ tution in his time, founded a scholarly physics journal and an academy of sciences, and trained hundreds of students.
Ramana Maharshi Vro-ma-no-ms-'hor-sheN orig. Venkatara- man Aiyer (b. Dec. 30, 1879, Madurai, Madras state, India—d. April 14, 1950, Tiruvannamalai) Hindu spiritual leader. Born into a Brahman family, he left his village at age 17 to become a hermit on Mount Arunachala, where Shiva was said to have entered the world at creation. One of India’s youngest gurus, he held that evil and death were an illu¬ sion, which could be dissipated through his technique of vicara (self- pondering inquiry), and that to achieve liberation from rebirth it was necessary to practice bhakti (devotional surrender) either to Shiva or to Ramana Maharshi himself.
Ramananda V.ra-mo-'non-dsV (b. c. 1400—d. c. 1470) Indian spiritual leader. He lived as an ascetic before settling in Varanasi (Benares) to study Vedic texts and the philosophy of Ramanuja. He was fifth in succession in the lineage of Ramanuja, but his determination to ignore caste distinc¬ tions led to a break with the philosopher’s other followers. With 12 dis¬ ciples he founded his own sect, the Ramanandis, who practiced devotion to Rama. His teachings were similar to Ramanuja’s, but he dropped the ban on intercaste dining and the strict rule that all teaching and all texts must be in Sanskrit, himself teaching in the vernacular Hindi in order to reach the masses who did not know Sanskrit.
Ramanuja \ra-'ma-nu-j3\ (b. c. 1017, Shriperumbudur, India—d. 1137, Shrirangam) Indian theologian and philosopher, the most influential thinker of devotional Hinduism. After a long pilgrimage through India, he founded centres to spread devotion to Vishnu and Lakshmi. He provided an intellectual basis for the practice of bhakti in major commentaries on the Vedas, the Brahma-sutras, and the Bhagavadgita. He was a major figure in the school of Visistadvaita, which emphasized the need for the soul to be united with a personal god.
His chief philosophical contributions follow from his conviction that the phenomenal world is real and pro¬ vides real knowledge and that the exigencies of daily life are not con¬ trary to the life of the spirit.
Ramanujan \ra-'man-u-j3 n \,
Srinivasa (Aaiyangar) (b. Dec.
22, 1887, Erode, India—d. April 26,
1920, Kumbakonam) Indian mathematician. Extremely poor, he was largely self-taught from age 15. In 1913 he began a correspondence with Godfrey H. Hardy (1877-1947) that took him to England, where he made advances, especially in the theory of numbers, the partition of numbers, and the theory of continued fractions. He published papers in English and European journals, and in 1918 he became the first Indian elected to the Royal Society of London. He died of tuberculosis at age 32, generally unknown but recognized by mathematicians as a phenomenal genius.
Ramatirtha V.ra-mo-'tir-toV orig. Tirath Rama (b. 1873, Miraliwala, Punjab province, India—d. Oct. 17, 1906, Tehri, United Provinces of Agra and Oudh) Hindu religious leader. He was a professor of mathematics before a meeting with Vivekananda strengthened his desire to pursue a