title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman was drawn to theater in his youth after attending a stage production of Arthur Miller's "All My Sons" at age 12. He studied acting at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and began his screen career in a 1991 episode of "Law & Order", starting to appear in films in 1992. He gained recognition for his supporting work, notably in "Scent of a Woman" (1992), "Twister" (1996), "Boogie Nights" (1997), "Patch Adams" (1998), "The Big Lebowski" (1998), "Magnolia" (1999), "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (1999), "Almost Famous" (2000), and "Along Came Polly" (2004). He began to occasionally play leading roles, and for his portrayal of the author Truman Capote in "Capote" (2005), he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Hoffman's profile continued to grow and he received three nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performances as a brutally frank CIA officer in "Charlie Wilson's War" (2007), a Catholic priest accused of pedophilia in "Doubt" (2008), and the charismatic leader of a Scientology-type movement in "The Master" (2012).


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: While he mainly worked in independent films, including "The Savages" (2007) and "Synecdoche, New York" (2008), Hoffman also appeared in "Flawless" (1999), and Hollywood blockbusters such as "Twister" (1996), "" (2006), and in one of his final roles, as Plutarch Heavensbee in the "Hunger Games" series (2013–2015). The feature "Jack Goes Boating" (2010) marked his debut as a filmmaker. Hoffman was also an accomplished theater actor and director. He joined the off-Broadway LAByrinth Theater Company in 1995, where he directed, produced, and appeared in numerous stage productions. His performances in three Broadway plays—"True West" in 2000, "Long Day's Journey into Night" in 2003, and "Death of a Salesman" in 2012—all led to Tony Award nominations.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman struggled with drug addiction as a young adult and relapsed in 2012 after many years of abstinence. In February 2014, he died of combined drug intoxication. Remembered for his fearlessness in playing reprehensible characters, and for bringing depth and humanity to such roles, Hoffman was described in his "New York Times" obituary as "perhaps the most ambitious and widely admired American actor of his generation".


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Philip Hoffman was born on July 23, 1967, in the Rochester suburb of Fairport, New York. His mother, Marilyn O'Connor (née Loucks), came from nearby Waterloo and worked as an elementary school teacher before becoming a lawyer and eventually a family court judge. His father, Gordon Stowell Hoffman, was a native of Geneva, New York, and worked for the Xerox Corporation. Along with one brother, Gordy, Hoffman had two sisters, Jill and Emily. His ancestry included German and Irish.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman was baptized a Catholic and attended Mass as a child, but did not have a heavily religious upbringing. His parents divorced when he was nine, and the children were raised primarily by their mother. Hoffman's childhood passion was sports, particularly wrestling and baseball, but at age 12, he attended a stage production of Arthur Miller's "All My Sons" and was transfixed. He recalled in 2008, "I was changed—permanently changed—by that experience. It was like a miracle to me". Hoffman developed a love for the theater, and proceeded to attend regularly with his mother, who was a lifelong enthusiast. He remembered that productions of "Quilters" and "Alms for the Middle Class", the latter starring a teenaged Robert Downey, Jr., were also particularly inspirational. At the age of 14, Hoffman suffered a neck injury that ended his sporting activity, and he began to consider acting. Encouraged by his mother, he joined a drama club, and initially committed to it because he was attracted to a female member.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Acting gradually became a passion for Hoffman: "I loved the camaraderie of it, the people, and that's when I decided it was what I wanted to do." At the age of 17, he was selected to attend the 1984 New York State Summer School of the Arts in Saratoga Springs, where he met his future collaborators Bennett Miller and Dan Futterman. Miller later commented on Hoffman's popularity at the time: "We were attracted to the fact that he was genuinely serious about what he was doing. Even then, he was passionate." Hoffman applied for several drama degree programs and was accepted to New York University's (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts. Between graduating from Fairport High School and beginning the program, he continued his training at the Circle in the Square Theatre's summer program. Hoffman had positive memories of his time at NYU, where he supported himself by working as an usher. With friends, he co-founded the Bullstoi Ensemble acting troupe. He received a drama degree in 1989.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: After graduating, Hoffman worked in off-Broadway theater and made additional money with customer service jobs. He made his screen debut in 1991, in a "Law & Order" episode called "The Violence of Summer", playing a man accused of rape. His first cinema role came the following year, when he was credited as "Phil Hoffman" in the independent film "Triple Bogey on a Par Five Hole". After this, he adopted his grandfather's name, Seymour, to avoid confusion with another actor. More film roles promptly followed, with appearances in the studio production "My New Gun", and a small role in the comedy "Leap of Faith", starring Steve Martin. Following these roles, he gained attention playing a spoiled student in the Oscar-winning Al Pacino film "Scent of a Woman" (1992). Hoffman auditioned five times for his role, which "The Guardian" journalist Ryan Gilbey says gave him an early opportunity "to indulge his skill for making unctuousness compelling". The film earned US$134 million worldwide and was the first to get Hoffman noticed. Reflecting on "Scent of a Woman", Hoffman later said, "If I hadn't gotten into that film, I wouldn't be where I am today." At this time, he abandoned his job in a delicatessen to become a professional actor.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman continued playing small roles throughout the early 1990s. After appearing in "Joey Breaker" and the critically panned teen zombie picture "My Boyfriend's Back", he had a more notable role playing John Cusack's wealthy friend in the crime comedy "Money for Nothing". In 1994, he portrayed an inexperienced mobster in the crime thriller "The Getaway", starring Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, and he subsequently appeared with Andy García and Meg Ryan in the romantic drama "When a Man Loves a Woman". He then played an uptight police deputy who gets punched by Paul Newman—one of Hoffman's acting idols—in the drama "Nobody's Fool".


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Still considering stage work to be fundamental to his career, Hoffman joined the LAByrinth Theater Company of New York City in 1995. This association lasted the remainder of his life; along with appearing in multiple productions, he later became co-artistic director of the theater company with John Ortiz, and directed various plays over the years. Hoffman's only film appearance of 1995 was in the 22-minute short comedy "The Fifteen Minute Hamlet", which satirized the film industry in an Elizabethan setting. He played the characters of Bernardo, Horatio, and Laertes alongside Austin Pendleton's Hamlet.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Between April and May 1996, Hoffman appeared at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in a Mark Wing-Davey production of Caryl Churchill's "The Skriker". Following this, based on his work in "Scent of a Woman", he was cast by writer–director Paul Thomas Anderson to appear in his debut feature "Hard Eight" (1996). Hoffman had only a brief role in the crime thriller, playing a cocksure young craps player, but it began the most important collaboration of his career.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Before cementing his creative partnership with Anderson, Hoffman appeared in one of the year's biggest blockbusters, "Twister", playing a grubby, hyperactive storm chaser alongside Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton. According to a "People" survey of Twitter and Facebook users, "Twister" is the film with which Hoffman is most popularly associated. He then reunited with Anderson for the director's second feature, "Boogie Nights", about the Golden Age of Pornography. The ensemble piece starred Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, and Burt Reynolds; Hoffman played a boom operator, described by David Fear of "Rolling Stone" as a "complete, unabashed loser", who attempts to seduce Wahlberg's character. Warmly received by critics, the film grew into a cult classic, and has been cited as the role in which Hoffman first showed his full ability. Fear commended the "naked emotional neediness" of the performance, adding that it made for compulsive viewing. Hoffman later expressed his appreciation for Anderson when he called the director "incomparable".


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Continuing with this momentum, Hoffman appeared in five films in 1998. He had supporting roles in the crime thriller "Montana" and the romantic comedy "Next Stop Wonderland", both of which were commercial failures, before working with the Coen brothers in their dark comedy "The Big Lebowski". Hoffman had long been a fan of the directors, and relished the experience of working with them. Appearing alongside Jeff Bridges and John Goodman, Hoffman played Brandt, the smug personal assistant of the titular character. Although it was only a small role, he claimed it was one for which he was most recognized, in a film that has achieved cult status and a large fan base. Between March and April 1998, Hoffman made 30 appearances on stage at the New York Theatre Workshop in a production of Mark Ravenhill's "Shopping and Fucking", portraying an ex-heroin addict.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman took an unflattering role in Todd Solondz's "Happiness" (1998), a misanthropic black comedy about the lives of three sisters and those around them. He played Allen, a strange loner who makes crude phone calls to women; the character furiously masturbates during one conversation, producing what film scholar Jerry Mosher calls an "embarrassingly raw performance". Jake Coyle of the Associated Press rated Allen as one of the creepiest characters in American cinema, but critic Xan Brooks highlighted the pathos that Hoffman brought to the role. "Happiness" was controversial but widely praised, and Hoffman's role has been cited by critics as one of his best. His final 1998 release was more mainstream, as he appeared as a medical graduate in the Robin Williams comedy "Patch Adams". The film was critically panned, but one of the highest-grossing of Hoffman's career.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: In 1999, Hoffman starred opposite Robert De Niro as drag queen Rusty Zimmerman in Joel Schumacher's drama "Flawless". Hoffman considered De Niro the most imposing actor with whom he had appeared, and he felt that working with the veteran performer profoundly improved his own acting. Hoffman's ability to avoid clichés in playing such a delicate role was noted by critics, and Roger Ebert said it confirmed him as "one of the best new character actors". He was rewarded with his first Screen Actors Guild Award nomination. Hoffman then reunited with Paul Thomas Anderson, where he was given an atypically virtuous role in the ensemble drama "Magnolia". The film, set over one day in Los Angeles, features Hoffman as a nurse who cares for Jason Robards' character. The performance was approved of by the medical industry, and Jessica Winter of the "Village Voice" considered it Hoffman's most indelible work, likening him to a guardian angel in his caring for the dying father. "Magnolia" has been included in lists of the greatest films of all time, and it was a personal favorite of Hoffman's.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: One of the most critically and commercially successful films of Hoffman's career was "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (1999), which he considered "as edgy as you can get for a Hollywood movie". He played a "preppy bully" who taunts Matt Damon's Ripley in the thriller, a character which Jeff Simon of "The Buffalo News" called "the truest upper class twit in all of American movies". Hoffman's performance caught the attention of Meryl Streep, another of his cinematic idols: "I sat up straight in my seat and said, 'Who is that?' I thought to myself: My God, this actor is fearless. He's done what we all strive for—he's given this awful character the respect he deserves, and he's made him fascinating." In recognition of his work in "Magnolia" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley", Hoffman was named the year's Best Supporting Actor by the National Board of Review.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Following a string of roles in successful films in the late 1990s, Hoffman had established a reputation as a top supporting player who could be relied on to make an impression with each performance. His film appearances were likened by David Kamp of "GQ" to "discovering a prize in a box of cereal, receiving a bonus, or bumping unexpectedly into an old friend". According to Jerry Mosher, as the year 2000 began, "it seemed Hoffman was everywhere, poised on the cusp of stardom".


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman had begun to be recognized as a theater actor in 1999, when he received a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Featured Actor for the off-Broadway play "The Author's Voice". This success continued with the 2000 Broadway revival of Sam Shepard's "True West", where Hoffman alternated roles nightly with co-star John C. Reilly, making 154 appearances between March and July 2000. Ben Brantley of "The New York Times" felt that it was the best stage performance of Hoffman's career, calling him "brilliant", and the actor earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play. The following year, Hoffman appeared with Meryl Streep, Natalie Portman, and John Goodman in a Delacorte Theater production of Chekhov's "The Seagull"—although Brantley felt that this performance was less fully realized. As a stage director, Hoffman received two Drama Desk Award nominations for Outstanding Director of a Play: one for "Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train" in 2001, and another for "Our Lady of 121st Street" in 2003. In a 2008 interview, Hoffman opined that "switching hats" between acting and directing helped him improve in both roles.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: David Mamet's comedy "State and Main", about the difficulties of shooting a film in rural New England, was Hoffman's first film role of 2000 and had a limited release. He had a more prominent supporting role that year in "Almost Famous", Cameron Crowe's popular coming-of-age film set in the 1970s music industry. Hoffman portrayed the enthusiastic rock critic Lester Bangs, a task by which he felt burdened, but he managed to convey the real figure's mannerisms and sharp wit after watching him in a BBC interview. The following year, Hoffman featured as the narrator and interviewer in "The Party's Over", a documentary about the 2000 U.S. elections. He assumed the position of a "politically informed and alienated Generation-Xer" who seeks to be educated in U.S. politics, but ultimately reveals the extent of public dissatisfaction in this area.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: In 2002, Hoffman was given his first leading role (despite joking at the time "Even if I was hired into a leading-man part, I'd probably turn it into the non-leading-man part") in Todd Louiso's tragicomedy "Love Liza" (2002). His brother Gordy wrote the script, which Hoffman had seen at their mother's house five years earlier, about a widower who starts sniffing gasoline to cope with his wife's suicide. He considered it the finest piece of writing he had ever read, "incredibly humble in its exploration of grief", but critics were less enthusiastic about the production. A review for the BBC wrote that Hoffman had finally been given a part that showed "what he's truly capable of", but few witnessed this as the film had a limited release and earned only US$210,000.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Later in 2002, Hoffman starred opposite Adam Sandler and Emily Watson in Anderson's critically acclaimed fourth picture, the surrealist romantic comedy-drama "Punch-Drunk Love" (2002), where he played an illegal phone-sex "supervisor". Drew Hunt of the "Chicago Reader" saw the performance as a fine example of Hoffman's "knack for turning small roles into seminal performances" and praised the actor's comedic ability. In a very different film, Hoffman was next seen with Anthony Hopkins in the high-budget thriller "Red Dragon", a prequel to "The Silence of the Lambs", portraying the meddlesome tabloid journalist Freddy Lounds. His fourth appearance of 2002 came in Spike Lee's drama "25th Hour", playing an English teacher who makes a devastating drunken mistake. Both Lee and the film's lead Edward Norton were thrilled to work with Hoffman, and Lee confessed that he had long wanted to do a picture with the actor, but had waited until he found the right role. Hoffman considered his character, Jakob, to be one of the most reticent characters he had ever played, a straight-laced "corduroy-pants-wearing kind of guy." Roger Ebert promoted "25th Hour" to one of his "Great Movies" in 2009, and along with A. O. Scott, considered it to be one of the best films of the 2000s.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: The drama "Owning Mahowny" (2003) gave Hoffman his second lead role, starring opposite Minnie Driver as a bank employee who embezzles money to feed his gambling addiction. Based on the true story of Toronto banker Brian Molony, who committed the largest fraud in Canadian history, Hoffman met with Molony to prepare for the role and help him play the character as accurately as possible. He was determined not to conform to "movie character" stereotypes, and his portrayal of addiction won approval from the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Roger Ebert assessed Hoffman's performance as "a masterpiece of discipline and precision," but the film earned little at the box office.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman's second 2003 appearance was a small role in Anthony Minghella's successful Civil War epic "Cold Mountain". He played an immoral preacher, a complex character that Hoffman described as a "mass of contradictions". The same year, from April to August, he appeared with Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Dennehy, and Robert Sean Leonard in a Broadway revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night". Director Robert Falls later commented on the dedication and experience that Hoffman brought to his role of alcoholic Jamie Tyrone: "Every night he ripped it up to an extent that he couldn't leave [the role]. Phil carried it with him." Hoffman received his second Tony Award nomination, this time for Best Featured Actor in a Play. In 2004, he appeared as the crude, has-been actor friend of Ben Stiller's character in the box-office hit "Along Came Polly". Reflecting on the role, "People" said it proved that "Hoffman could deliver comedic performances with the best of them".


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: A turning point in Hoffman's career came with the biographical film "Capote" (2005), which dramatized Truman Capote's experience of writing his true crime novel "In Cold Blood" (1966). Hoffman took the title role for a project that he co-produced and helped bring to fruition. Portraying the idiosyncratic writer proved highly demanding, requiring significant weight loss and four months of research—such as watching video clips of Capote to help him affect the author's effeminate voice and mannerisms. Hoffman stated that he was not concerned with perfectly imitating Capote's speech, but he did feel a great duty to "express the vitality and the nuances" of the writer. During filming, he stayed in character constantly so as not to lose the voice and posture: "Otherwise," he explained, "I would give my body a chance to bail on me." "Capote" was released to great acclaim, particularly regarding Hoffman's performance. Many critics commented that the role was designed to win awards, and indeed Hoffman received an Oscar, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild Award, BAFTA, and various other critics' awards. In 2006, "Premiere" listed his role in "Capote" as the 35th-greatest movie performance of all time. After the film, several commentators began to describe Hoffman as one of the finest, most ambitious actors of his generation.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman received his only Primetime Emmy Award nomination for his supporting role in the HBO miniseries "Empire Falls" (2005), about life in a New England town. He ultimately lost to castmate Paul Newman. In 2006, he appeared in the summer blockbuster "", playing the villainous arms dealer Owen Davian opposite Tom Cruise. A journalist for "Vanity Fair" stated that Hoffman's "black-hat performance was one of the most delicious in a Hollywood film since Alan Rickman's in "Die Hard" ", and he was generally approved of for bringing gravitas to the action film. With a gross of nearly US$400 million, it exposed Hoffman to a mainstream audience.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Returning to independent films in 2007, Hoffman began with a starring role in Tamara Jenkins's "The Savages", where Laura Linney and he played siblings responsible for putting their dementia-ridden father (Philip Bosco) in a care home. Jake Coyle of the Associated Press stated that it was "the epitome of a Hoffman film: a mix of comedy and tragedy told with subtlety, bone-dry humor, and flashes of grace". Hoffman received a Golden Globe nomination for his performance in "The Savages". He next appeared in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead", the final film by veteran director Sidney Lumet, where he played a realtor who embezzles funds from his employer to support his drug habit. Mosher comments that the character was one of the most unpleasant of Hoffman's career, but that his "fearlessness again revealed the humanity within a deeply flawed character" as he appeared naked in the opening sex scene. The film was received positively by critics as a powerful and affecting thriller.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Mike Nichols's political film "Charlie Wilson's War" (2007) gave Hoffman his second Academy Award nomination, again for playing a real individual—Gust Avrakotos, the CIA agent who conspired with Congressman Charlie Wilson (played by Tom Hanks) to aid Afghani rebels in their fight against the Soviet Union. Todd McCarthy wrote of Hoffman's performance: "Decked out with a pouffy '80s hairdo, moustache, protruding gut and ever-present smokes ... whenever he's on, the picture vibrates with conspiratorial electricity." The film was a critical and commercial success, and along with his Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, Hoffman was nominated for a BAFTA and a Golden Globe Award.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: The year 2008 contained two significant Hoffman roles. In Charlie Kaufman's enigmatic drama "Synecdoche, New York", he starred as Caden Cotard, a frustrated dramatist who attempts to build a scale replica of New York inside a warehouse for a play. Hoffman again showed his willingness to reveal unattractive traits, as the character ages and deteriorates, and committed to a deeply psychological role. Critics were divided in their response to the "ambitious and baffling" film. Sonny Bunch of "The Washington Times" found it "impressionistic, inaccessible, and endlessly frustrating", likening Hoffman's character to "God, if God lacked imagination". Conversely, Roger Ebert named it the best film of the decade and considered it one of the greatest of all time, and Robbie Collin, film critic for "The Daily Telegraph", believes Hoffman gave one of cinema's best performances.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman's second role of the year came opposite Meryl Streep and Amy Adams in John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt", where he played Father Brendan Flynn—a priest accused of sexually abusing a 12-year-old African-American student in the 1960s. Hoffman was already familiar with the play and appreciated the opportunity to bring it to the screen; in preparing for the role, he talked extensively to a priest who lived through the era. The film had a mixed reception, with some critics such as Peter Bradshaw of "The Guardian" suspicious of it as Oscar bait, but Hoffman gained second consecutive Best Supporting Actor nominations at the Oscars, BAFTAs, and Golden Globes, and was also nominated by the Screen Actors Guild.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: On stage in 2009, Hoffman played Iago in Peter Sellars' futuristic production of "Othello" (with the title role by John Ortiz), which received mixed reviews. Ben Brantley, theatre critic of "The New York Times", found it to be "exasperatingly misconceived", remarking that even when Hoffman is attempting to "manipulate others into self-destruction, he comes close to spoiling everything by erupting into genuine, volcanic fury". Hoffman also did his first vocal performance for the claymation film "Mary and Max", although the film did not initially have an American release. He played Max, a depressed New Yorker with Asperger syndrome, while Toni Collette voiced Mary—the Australian girl who becomes his pen pal. Continuing with animation, Hoffman then worked on an episode of the children's show "Arthur" and received a Daytime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Performer In An Animated Program. Later in the year, he played a brash American disc jockey opposite Bill Nighy and Rhys Ifans in Richard Curtis's British comedy "The Boat That Rocked" (also known as "Pirate Radio")—a character based on Emperor Rosko, a host of Radio Caroline in 1966. He also had a cameo role as a bartender in Ricky Gervais's "The Invention of Lying".


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Reflecting on Hoffman's work in the late 2000s, Mosher writes that the actor remained impressive, but had not delivered a testing performance on the level of his work in "Capote". The film critic David Thomson believed that Hoffman showed indecisiveness at this time, unsure whether to play spectacular supporting roles or become a lead actor who is capable of controlling the emotional dynamic and outcome of a film.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman's profile continued to grow with the new decade, and he became an increasingly recognizable figure. Despite earlier reservations about directing for the screen, his first release of the 2010s was also his first as a film director. The independent drama "Jack Goes Boating" was adapted from Robert Glaudini's play of the same name, in which Hoffman had starred and directed for the LAByrinth Theater Company in 2007. He originally intended to only direct the film, but decided to reprise the main role of Jack—a lonely limousine driver looking for love—after the actor he wanted for it was unavailable. The low-key film had a limited release, and was not a high earner, though it received many positive reviews. However, Dave Edwards of the "Daily Mirror" remarked that "Hoffman's directing debut delivers a film so weak I could barely remember what it was about as I left", while critic Mark Kermode appreciated the cinematic qualities that Hoffman brought to the film, and stated that he showed potential as a director. In addition to "Jack Goes Boating", in 2010 Hoffman also directed Brett C. Leonard's tragic drama "The Long Red Road" for the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Steven Oxman of "Variety" described the production as "heavy handed" and "predictable", but "intriguing and at least partially successful".


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman next had significant supporting roles in two films, both released in the last third of 2011. In Bennett Miller's "Moneyball", a sports drama about the 2002 season of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, he played the coach Art Howe. The film was a critical and commercial success, and Hoffman was described as "perfectly cast" by Ann Hornaday of "The Washington Post", but the real-life Art Howe accused the filmmakers of giving an "unfair and untrue" portrayal of him. Hoffman's second film of the year was George Clooney's political drama "The Ides of March", in which he played the earnest campaign manager to the Democratic presidential candidate Mike Morris (Clooney). The film was well-received and Hoffman's performance, especially in the scenes opposite Paul Giamatti—who played the rival campaign manager—was positively noted. Hoffman's work on the film earned him his fourth BAFTA Award nomination.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: In the spring of 2012, Hoffman made his final stage appearance, starring as Willy Loman in a Broadway revival of "Death of a Salesman" opposite Andrew Garfield. Directed by Mike Nichols, the production ran for 78 performances and was the highest-grossing show in the Ethel Barrymore Theatre's history. Many critics felt that Hoffman, at 44, was too young for the role of 62-year-old Loman, and Chris Jones of the "Chicago Tribune" felt that the character had been interpreted poorly. Hoffman admitted that he found the role difficult, but he nevertheless earned his third Tony Award nomination.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman collaborated with Paul Thomas Anderson for the fifth time in "The Master" (2012), where he turned in what critic Peter Bradshaw considered the most memorable performance of his career. Set in 1950s America, the film featured Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd, the charismatic leader of a nascent Scientology-type movement who brings a troubled man (Joaquin Phoenix) under his tutelage. Hoffman was instrumental in the project's development, having been involved with it for three years. He assisted Anderson in the writing of the script by reviewing samples of it, and suggested making Phoenix's character, Freddie Quell, the protagonist instead of Dodd. A talented dancer, Hoffman was able to showcase his abilities by performing a jig during a surreal sequence; Bradshaw called it an "extraordinary moment" that "only Hoffman could have carried off." "The Master" was praised as an intelligent and challenging drama, and Drew Hunt of the "Chicago Reader" also felt that it contained Hoffman's finest work: "He's inscrutable yet welcoming, intimidating yet charismatic, villainous yet fatherly. He epitomizes so many things at once that it's impossible to think of [Dodd] as mere movie character". Hoffman and Phoenix received a joint Volpi Cup Award at the Venice Film Festival for their performances, and Hoffman was also nominated for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA Award and a SAG Award for the supporting role.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: "A Late Quartet" was Hoffman's other film release of 2012, where he played a violinist in a string quartet whose members (played by Christopher Walken, Catherine Keener, and Mark Ivanir) face a crisis when one is diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. The drama received favorable reviews, and Stephen Holden of "The New York Times" called Hoffman's performance "exceptional". In 2013, Hoffman joined the popular "Hunger Games" series in its second film, "", where he played gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee. The film finished as the 10th-highest grossing in history to that point, and Hoffman became recognizable to a new generation of film-goers. In January 2014, shortly before his death, he attended the Sundance Film Festival to promote two films. In Anton Corbijn's "A Most Wanted Man", a thriller based on John le Carré's novel, Hoffman played a German intelligence officer. His performance was praised by Xan Brooks as one of "terrific, lip-smacking relish: full of mischief, anchored by integrity." The other was "God's Pocket", the directorial debut of actor John Slattery, in which Hoffman played a thief. In November 2014, nine months after his death, Hoffman was seen in "".


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: At the time of his death, Hoffman was filming "", the fourth film in the series, and had already completed the majority of his scenes. His two remaining scenes were rewritten to compensate for his absence, and the film was released in November 2015. Hoffman was also preparing for his second directorial effort, a Prohibition-era drama titled "Ezekiel Moss", which was to star Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal. In addition, he had filmed a pilot episode for the Showtime series "Happyish", in which he played the lead role of an advertising executive, but plans for a full season were put on hold following his death. The role was later passed on to Steve Coogan.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman rarely mentioned his personal life in interviews, stating in 2012 that he would "rather not because my family doesn't have any choice. If I talk about them in the press, I'm giving them no choice. So I choose not to." For 14 years, he was in a relationship with costume designer Mimi O'Donnell, whom he had met in 1999 when they were both working on the Hoffman-directed play "In Arabia We'd All Be Kings". They lived in New York City and had a son, Cooper, and two daughters. While some reports stated Hoffman and O'Donnell separated in the fall of 2013, O'Donnell later said she and Hoffman were both committed to their relationship, but he had moved out of their longtime residence to a nearby apartment to protect their children from the effects of his relapse into substance abuse.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman was also discreet about his religious and political beliefs, but it is known that he voted for the Green Party candidate Ralph Nader in the 2000 presidential election. He felt that keeping his personal life private was beneficial to his career: "The less you know about me the more interesting it will be to watch me do what I do".


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: In a 2006 interview with "60 Minutes", Hoffman revealed he had engaged in drug and alcohol misuse during his time at New York University, saying he had used "anything I could get my hands on. I liked it all." Following his graduation in 1989, he entered a drug rehabilitation program aged 22, and remained sober for 23 years. However, he relapsed in 2013, and admitted himself to drug rehabilitation for about ten days in May 2013.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: On February 2, 2014, Hoffman was found dead in the bathroom of his Manhattan apartment by his friend, the playwright and screenwriter David Bar Katz. He was 46 years old. Although friends stated that Hoffman's drug use was under control at the time, detectives searching the apartment found heroin and prescription medication at the scene and revealed that he had a syringe in his arm. Hoffman's death was officially ruled an accident caused by "acute mixed drug intoxication, including heroin, cocaine, benzodiazepines, and amphetamine". Michael Schwirtz of "The New York Times" said, "Whether Hoffman had taken all of the substances on the same day, or whether any of the substances had remained in his system from earlier use, was not reported."


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: A funeral Mass was held at St. Ignatius Loyola Church in Manhattan on February 7, 2014, and was attended by many of his former co-stars including Amy Adams, Cate Blanchett, Ellen Burstyn, Louis C.K., Ethan Hawke, Laura Linney, Julianne Moore, Mike Nichols, Joaquin Phoenix, Chris Rock, Diane Sawyer, Jerry Stiller, Meryl Streep, Marisa Tomei, and Michelle Williams. Hoffman was cremated. He left his fortune of around $35 million to Mimi O'Donnell in his October 2004 will, trusting her to distribute money to their children.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman's death was lamented by fans and the film industry and was described by several commentators as a considerable loss to the profession. On February 5, 2014, the LAByrinth Theatre Company honored his memory by holding a candlelight vigil, and Broadway dimmed its lights for one minute. Three weeks after Hoffman's death, Katz established the American Playwriting Foundation in Hoffman's memory. With the money received from a libel lawsuit against the "National Enquirer" which inaccurately claimed that Hoffman and Katz were lovers, the foundation awards an annual prize of $45,000 to the author of an unproduced play. Katz named this the "Relentless Prize" in honor of Hoffman's dedication to the profession. He would later remember Hoffman with a poem published in "The Guardian" in December 2014. At the 90th Academy Awards, Sam Rockwell dedicated his win for Best Supporting Actor to Hoffman. In another tribute, actress Cate Blanchett dedicated her BAFTA trophy to Hoffman when she received the award for "Blue Jasmine" on February 16.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman was held in high regard within both the film and theater industries, and he was often cited in the media as one of the finest actors of his generation. With a pudgy build and lacking matinée idol looks, he was not a typical movie actor; however, Hoffman claimed that he was grateful for his appearance, as it made him believable in a wide range of roles. Joel Schumacher once said of him in 2000, "The bad news is that Philip won't be a $25-million star. The good news is that he'll work for the rest of his life". The "Aiken Standard" of South Carolina referred to him as an "anti-star", whose real identity remained "amorphous and unmoored". Hoffman was acutely aware that he was often too unorthodox for the Academy voters. He remarked, "I'm sure that people in the big corporations that run Hollywood don't know quite what to do with someone like me, but that's OK. I think there are other people who are interested in what I do."


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Most of Hoffman's notable roles came in independent films, including particularly original ones, but he also featured in several Hollywood blockbusters. He generally played supporting roles, appearing in both dramas and comedies, but was noted for his ability to make small parts memorable. Peter Bradshaw, film critic for "The Guardian", felt that "Almost every single one of his credits had something special about it". David Fear of "Rolling Stone" wrote that Hoffman "added heft to low-budget art films, and nuance and unpredictability to blockbuster franchises. He was a transformative performer who worked from the inside out, blessed with an emotional transparency that could be overwhelming, invigorating, compelling, devastating."


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman was praised for his versatility and ability to fully inhabit any role, but specialized in playing creeps and misfits: "his CV was populated almost exclusively by snivelling wretches, insufferable prigs, braggarts and outright bullies" writes the journalist Ryan Gilbey. Hoffman was appreciated for making these roles real, complex and even sympathetic; while Todd Louiso, director of "Love Liza", believed that Hoffman connected to people on screen because he looked like an ordinary man and revealed his vulnerability. Xan Brooks of "The Guardian" remarked that the actor's particular talent was to "take thwarted, twisted humanity and ennoble it". "The more pathetic or deluded the character," writes Gilbey, "the greater Hoffman's relish seemed in rescuing them from the realms of the merely monstrous." When asked in 2006 why he undertook such roles, Hoffman responded, "I didn't go out looking for negative characters; I went out looking for people who have a struggle and a fight to tackle. That's what interests me."


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: The journalist Jeff Simon described Hoffman as "probably the most in-demand character actor of his generation", but Hoffman claimed never to take it for granted that he would be offered roles. Although he worked hard and regularly, he was humble about his acting success, and when asked by a friend if he was having any luck he quietly replied, "I'm in a film, "Cold Mountain", that has just come out." Patrick Fugit, who worked with Hoffman on "Almost Famous", recalled the actor was intimidating but an exceptional mentor and influence in "a school-of-hard-knocks way", remarking that "there was a certain weight that came with him". Hoffman admitted that he sometimes appeared in big-budget studio films for the money, but said, "ultimately my main goal is to do good work. If it doesn't pay well, so be it." He kept himself grounded and invigorated as an actor by attempting to appear on stage once a year.


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman occasionally changed his hair and lost or gained weight for parts, and he went to great lengths to reveal the worst in his characters. But in a 2012 interview, he confessed that performing to a high standard was a challenge: "The job isn't difficult. Doing it well is difficult." In an earlier interview with "The New York Times", he explained how deeply he loved acting but added, "that deep kind of love comes at a price: for me, acting is torturous, and it's torturous because you know it's a beautiful thing ... Wanting it is easy, but trying to be great—well, that's absolutely torturous." This struggle was confirmed by the author John le Carré, who met Hoffman during the adaptation of his novel "A Most Wanted Man". While praising the actor's intelligence and intuition, le Carré acknowledged the burden that Hoffman felt: "It was painful and exhausting work, and probably in the end his undoing. The world was too bright for him to handle."


title: Philip Seymour Hoffman

text: Hoffman appeared in 55 films and one miniseries during his screen career spanning 22 years. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for "Capote" (2005), and was nominated three times for Best Supporting Actor for "Charlie Wilson's War" (2007), "Doubt" (2008), and "The Master" (2012). He also received five Golden Globe Award nominations (winning one), five BAFTA Award nominations (winning one), four Screen Actors Guild Awards (winning one), and won the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival. Hoffman remained active in theater throughout his career, starring in ten and directing 19 stage productions (predominantly in New York). He received three Tony Award nominations for his Broadway performances: two for Best Leading Actor, in "True West" (2000) and "Death of a Salesman" (2012), and one for Best Featured Actor in "Long Day's Journey into Night" (2003).


title: Pinterest

text: Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards. The site was created by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, and had 433 million global monthly active users as of July 2022. It is operated by Pinterest, Inc., based in San Francisco.


title: Pinterest

text: The idea for "Pinterest" emerged from an earlier app created by Ben Silberman and Paul Sciarra called Tote which served as a virtual replacement for paper catalogs. Tote struggled as a business, significantly due to difficulties with mobile payments. At the time, mobile payment technology was not sophisticated enough to enable easy on-the-go transactions, inhibiting users from making many purchases via the app. Tote users were, however, amassing large collections of favorite items and sharing them with other users. The behavior struck a chord with Silberman, and he shifted the company to building Pinterest, which allowed users to create collections of a variety of items and share them with each other.


title: Pinterest

text: The development of Pinterest began in December 2009, and the site launched the prototype as a closed beta in March 2010. Nine months after the launch, the website had 10,000 users. Silbermann said he wrote to the first 5,000 users, offering his phone number and even meeting with some of them. The launch of an iPhone app in early March 2011 brought in more downloads than expected. This was followed by an iPad app and Pinterest Mobile, a version of the website for non-iPhone users. Silbermann and a few programmers operated the site out of a small apartment until the summer of 2011.


title: Pinterest

text: Pinterest grew rapidly during this period. On August 10, 2011, "Time" magazine listed Pinterest in its "50 Best Websites of 2011" article. In December 2011, the site became one of the top 10 largest social network services, according to Hitwise data, with 11 million total visits per week. Pinterest won the Best New Startup of 2011 at the TechCrunch Crunchies Awards. For January 2012, comScore reported the site had 11.7 million unique U.S. visitors, making it the fastest site ever to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark. At the 2012 Webby Awards, Pinterest won Best Social Media App and People's Voice Award for best functioning visual design.


title: Pinterest

text: On March 23, 2012, Pinterest unveiled updated terms of service that eliminated the policy that gave it the right to sell its users' content. On August 10, 2012, Pinterest altered their policy so that a request or an invitation was no longer required to join the site. In October 2012, Pinterest launched business accounts allowing businesses to either convert their existing personal accounts into business accounts or start from scratch.


title: Pinterest

text: In April 2017, Pinterest removed their dedicated post "liking" feature as it seemed redundant to "boards", which are user collections of posts. Users' existing indexes of liked posts were converted into a collection ("board") named as such.


title: Pinterest

text: Although starting out as a "social network" with boards, in later years the company has put increasing emphasis in visual search and e-commerce, such as shopping catalogs.


title: Pinterest

text: In February 2019, "The Wall Street Journal" stated that Pinterest secretly filed for an initial public offering (IPO) of stock. The total valuation of the company at the time reached $12 billion. They went public on April 18, 2019, at $19 per share, closing the day at $24.40 per share.


title: Pinterest

text: For 2020, Pinterest reported an advertising revenue of $1.7 billion, an increase of 48% from 2019. On March 3, 2021, Pinterest announced "Pinterest Premiere", a video ads product "which will appear in people’s feeds, targeted to their interests and other characteristics." Later in April, chief financial officer Todd Morgenfeld announced plans to spend more money on marketing in order to offset a potential slowdown in activity as the United States economy reopened, with more people getting vaccinated for COVID-19.


title: Pinterest

text: On October 20, 2021, Bloomberg reported that PayPal is interested in acquiring Pinterest, with a potential price of around $70 a share. PayPal's board and management decided later that same week to back away from a potential deal.


title: Pinterest

text: In December 2021, Pinterest acquired the editing and video creation app Vochi. Following this, In May 2022, it was announced that Pinterest released a new video streaming app “Pinterest TV studio”. The app is aimed at allowing users to live-stream on its platform and use different devices for different angles while live-streaming on the Pinterest platform.


title: Pinterest

text: On June 28, 2022, Pinterest announced that co-founder, CEO and President, Ben Silberman would transition to the newly created role of Executive Chairman, and online commerce expert Bill Ready will become Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors.


title: Pinterest

text: The creators behind Pinterest summarized the service as a "catalogue of ideas" that inspires users to "go out and do that thing", although that it is not an image-based "social network". It also has a very large fashion profile. In later years, Pinterest has also been described as a "visual search engine".


title: Pinterest

text: Pinterest consists mainly of "pins" and "boards". A pin is an image that has been linked from a website or uploaded. Pins saved from one user's board can be saved to someone else's board, a process known as "repinning". Boards are collections of pins dedicated to a theme such as quotations, travel, or weddings. Boards with multiple ideas can have different sections that further contain multiple pins. Users can follow and unfollow other users as well as boards, which would fill the "home feed".


title: Pinterest

text: Content can also be found outside Pinterest and similarly uploaded to a board via the "Save" button, which can be downloaded to the bookmark bar on a web browser,<ref name="Pinterest / goodies"></ref> or be implemented by a webmaster directly on the website. It was originally called the "Pin it" button but was renamed in 2016 to "Save" due to international expansion, making the site more intuitive to new users.


title: Pinterest

text: In August 2016, Pinterest launched a video player that lets users and brands upload and store clips of any length straight to the site.


title: Pinterest

text: The home feed is a collection of Pins from the users, boards, and topics followed, as well as a few promoted pins and pins Pinterest has picked. On the main Pinterest page, a "pin feed" appears, displaying the chronological activity from the Pinterest boards that a user follows.


title: Pinterest

text: In October 2013, Pinterest began displaying advertisements in the form of "Promoted Pins". Promoted Pins are based on an individual user's interests, things done on Pinterest, or a result of visiting an advertiser's site or app.


title: Pinterest

text: In October 2022, Pinterest announced its video-focused “Idea Pins” feature will now include the ability to add popular tracks from top artists, thanks to new licensing deals with Warner Music Group, Warner Chappell Music, Merlin and BMG.


title: Pinterest

text: In 2017, Pinterest introduced a "visual search" function that allows users to search for elements in images (existing pins, existing parts of a photo, or new photos) and guide users to suggested similar content within Pinterest's database. The tools powered by artificial intelligence are called Pinterest Lens, Shop the Look, and Instant Ideas.


title: Pinterest

text: The platform has drawn businesses, especially retailers, to create pages aimed at promoting their companies online as a "virtual storefront".


title: Pinterest

text: In 2013, Pinterest introduced a new tool called "Rich Pins", to enhance the customer experience when browsing through pins made by companies. Business pages can include various data, topics, and information such as prices of products, ratings of movies or ingredients for recipes.


title: Pinterest

text: In June 2015, Pinterest unveiled "buyable pins" that allows users to purchase things directly from Pinterest. In October 2018, the buyable pins feature was replaced by "Product Pins"


title: Pinterest

text: In March 2019, Pinterest added product catalogs and personalized shopping recommendations with the "more from [brand]" option, showcasing a range of product Pins from the same business.


title: Pinterest

text: Pinterest Analytics is much like Google Analytics. It is a created service that generates comprehensive statistics on a specific website's traffic, commonly used by marketers. "Pins", "pinners", "repins", and "repinners" are some aspects of user data that Pinterest Analytics provides. It also collects data that depicts the percentage of change within a specific time, to determine if a product is more popular on a specific day during the week, or slowly becoming unpopular. This data helps marketing agencies alter their strategies to gain more popularity, often changing the visual content to appeal to the Pinterest community. The "Most Clicked" tab in Pinterest Analytics demonstrates products that are more likely to sell. Through the access of Pinterest Analytics, companies receive insight to data via API.


title: Pinterest

text: In the "creator economy" era, social media platforms need to understand how to appease content creators to grow and sustain the platform's success. Thus, many sites now seek to support influencers and micro-celebrities to maintain engagement on the platform. However, Pinterest has typically differed from the standard of social media sites, with its conception creating a digital and visual bookmarking platform for displaying personal identities and tastes. The Pinterest interface emphasizes the content of pins and links while the users are the media through which the content is communicated, spreading among users through pinning and repinning. Therefore, Pinterest reduces the competitive and comparative nature of typical social media behavior by not centering its experience on whom people follow and their followers. The individualized formulation of the app makes it not very social; instead, it serves its pursuit to discover, develop, and refine personal interests. Pinterest faces a decline in a period with the creator economy where platforms like Tik-Tok allow content creators to directly engage with users, maintaining consistent engagement and presence on the app. Pinterest is not known for being a helpful app for content creators. However, the company is hoping to change that element. In 2021, the site announced its new Creator Fund, which aims to support creators and their ability to monetize their efforts to preserve engagement and interactions on the platform. The program's initial launch increased creators' overall monthly views by 72%. Pinterest will invest $1.2 million in underrepresented creators via cash grants, ad credits, and equipment. Ultimately, Pinterest recognizes the importance of the creator economy of social media. Without fostering the success of creators, the platform will lose engagement against other platforms that support the creator experience.


title: Pinterest

text: Pinterest is a free website that requires registration to use. The service is currently accessible through a web browser, and apps for iOS, Android, and Windows 10 PCs.


title: Pinterest

text: In February 2013, Reuters and ComScore stated that Pinterest had 48.7 million users globally, and a study released in July 2013 by French social media agency Semiocast revealed the website had 70 million users worldwide. In October 2016, the company had 150 million monthly active users (70 million in the U.S. and 80 million outside it), rising to 175 million monthly active users by April 2017 and 250 million in September 2018. As of July 2020, there were over 400 million monthly active users.


title: Pinterest

text: Around 2020, Pinterest was thought to flood search results in Google Images. In 2022 Google claimed to have performed changes to increase "diversity" in the search results. Pinterest claimed that, as a consequence of Google's changes of November 2021, "U.S. monthly active users coming to Pinterest from the web, desktop and mobile web declined around 30% year over year".


title: Pinterest

text: Pinterest has largely appealed to women, especially with its early user base. A 2020 report found that over 60% of the global users are women. Although men have not been a primary audience on Pinterest, it's been found that their usage has increased 48%. In terms of age distribution, users between the ages of 18-25 have grown twice as fast as those over the age of 25. However, both users between the ages of 18-25 and users between the ages of 25-40 have been driving the growth of Pinterest.


title: Pinterest

text: Data from Pinterest has been used for research in different areas. For example, it is possible to find patterns of activity that attract the attention of audience and content reposting, including the extent to which users specialize in particular topics, and homophily among users. Another work focused on studying the characteristics, manifestations and overall effects of user behaviors from various aspects, as well as correlations between neighboring users and the topology of the network structure. There is also study, that based on Pinterest proposed a novel pinboard recommendation system for Twitter users.


title: Pinterest

text: Pinterest, Inc. is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Originally it was based in Palo Alto before moving in 2012.


title: Pinterest

text: In early 2011, the company secured a US$10 million Series A financing led by Jeremy Levine and Sarah Tavel of Bessemer Venture Partners. In October 2011, the company secured US$27 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, which valued the company at US$200 million.


title: Pinterest

text: Co-founder Paul Sciarra left his position at Pinterest in April 2012 for a consulting job as entrepreneur in residence at Andreessen Horowitz.


title: Pinterest

text: On 17 May 2012, Japanese electronic commerce company Rakuten announced it was leading a $100 million investment in Pinterest, alongside investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital, based on a valuation of $1.5 billion.


title: Pinterest

text: On September 20, 2012, Pinterest announced the hiring of its new head of engineering, Jon Jenkins. Jenkins came from Amazon, where he spent eight years as an engineering lead and was also a director of developer tools, platform analysis and website platform.


title: Pinterest

text: In late October 2013, Pinterest secured a $225 million round of equity funding that valued the website at $3.8 billion.


title: Pinterest

text: In 2014, Pinterest generated its first revenue, when it began charging advertisers to promote their wares to the site's millions of hobbyists, vacation planners, and do-it-yourselfers. Ads on the site could generate as much as $500 million in 2016, estimates Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.


title: Pinterest

text: In 2015, investors valued Pinterest, Inc. at $11 billion, making it a "unicorn" (a start-up with a valuation exceeding $1 billion). the company was valued at $12 billion.


title: Pinterest

text: In August 2020, Pinterest paid $89.5 million to cancel a large office space lease on a to-be-completed complex in San Francisco's SoMa area, near their current headquarters.


title: Pinterest

text: In March 2013, Pinterest acquired Livestar. Terms were not disclosed. In early October 2013, Pinterest acquired Hackermeter. The company's co-founders, Lucas Baker and Frost Li, joined Pinterest as engineers.


title: Pinterest

text: In April 2015, Pinterest acquired the team from Hike Labs, which had been developing a mobile publishing application called Drafty.


title: Pinterest

text: In May 2016, Pinterest acquired mobile deep linking startup URX to help accelerate its content understanding efforts. The URX team's expertise in mobile content discovery and recommendation would prove critical to helping Pinterest understand its corpus of over 100 billion pins, to better recommend them to its users.


title: Pinterest

text: On August 23, 2016, Pinterest announced that it would be acquiring the team behind Instapaper, which will continue operating as a separate app. The Instapaper team will both work on the core Pinterest experience and updating Instapaper.


title: Pinterest

text: On March 8, 2017, Pinterest said it had acquired Jelly Industries, a small search-engine company founded by Biz Stone.


title: Pinterest

text: In June 2022, Pinterest announced their definitive agreement to acquire San Francisco based AI-driven fashion shopping platform, The Yes. Pinterest announced that it had closed the acquisition on June 10, 2022.


title: Pinterest

text: Pinterest has a notification system that copyright holders can use to request that content be removed from the site. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) safe harbor status of Pinterest has been questioned given that it actively promotes its users to copy to Pinterest, for their perpetual use, any image on the Internet. Pinterest users cannot claim safe harbor status and as such are exposed to possible legal action for pinning copyright material. Pinterest allows users to transfer information; intellectual property rights come to play.


title: Pinterest

text: A "nopin" HTML meta tag was released by Pinterest on 20 February 2012 to allow websites to opt out of their images being pinned. On 24 February 2012, Flickr implemented the code to allow users to opt out.


title: Pinterest

text: Pinterest released a statement in March 2012 saying it believed it was protected by the DMCA's safe harbor provisions.


title: Pinterest

text: In early May 2012, the site added automatic attribution of authors on images originating from Flickr, Behance, YouTube and Vimeo. Automatic attribution was also added for Pins from sites mirroring content on Flickr. At the same time, Flickr added a Pin shortcut to its share option menu to users who have not opted out of sharing their images.


title: Pinterest

text: Content creators on sites such as iStock have expressed concern over their work being reused on Pinterest without permission. Getty Images said that it was aware of Pinterest's copyright issues and was in discussion with them.


title: Pinterest

text: In February 2012, photographer and lawyer Kirsten Kowalski wrote a blog post explaining how her interpretation of copyright law led her to delete all her infringing pins. The post contributed to scrutiny over Pinterest's legal status. The post went viral and reached founder Ben Silbermann who contacted Kowalski to discuss making the website more compliant with the law.


title: Pinterest

text: Pinterest's earlier terms of service ambiguously asserted ownership of user content. A March 2012 article in "Scientific American" criticized Pinterest's self-imposed ownership of user content stating that "Pinterest's terms of service have been garnering a lot of criticism for stating in no uncertain terms that anything you 'pin' to their site belongs to them. Completely. Wholly. Forever and for always."


title: Pinterest

text: At the time, Pinterest's terms of service stated that "By making available any Member Content through the Site, Application or Services, you hereby grant to Cold Brew Labs a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, copy, adapt, modify, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, access, view, and otherwise exploit such Member Content only on, through or by means of the Site, Application or Services." Under these terms all personal, creative and intellectual property posted to the site belonged to the website and could be sold. A "Scientific American" blogger pointed out that this contradicted another line in the terms of service, that "Cold Brew Labs does not claim any ownership rights in any such Member Content".


title: Pinterest

text: Several days later, Pinterest unveiled updated terms of service that, once implemented in April, ended the site's previous claims of ownership of posted images. "Selling content was never our intention", said the company in a blog post.


title: Pinterest

text: Social engineering of Pinterest users by scammers to propagate surveys promising free products was noted by the computer security firm Symantec in March 2012. Scam images, often branded with a well-known company name like Starbucks, offer incentives such as gift cards for completing a survey. Once the link in the description is clicked, users are taken to an external site and asked to re-pin the scam image. Victims are phished for their personal information and the promised free product is never delivered.


title: Pinterest

text: In its 2019 "Who Has Your Back?" report, the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Pinterest a three (out of six) star rating, highlighting improvements in the company's transparency reports about government takedown notices, but criticizing the lack of a clear commitment to notify users about content removals and account suspensions.


title: Pinterest

text: In March 2017, Chinese authorities blocked Pinterest without explanation. The block was imposed during the annual National People's Congress, a politically sensitive period in the country. While Pinterest is not known for its political content, experts identified the ban as consistent with Chinese government efforts to use website blocks and the "Great Firewall" as an industrial policy tool to promote Chinese tech companies (e.g., Baidu, Youku, Weibo, and Renren) by censoring foreign tech companies. Huaban, Duitang and many other websites bear similarities to Pinterest.


title: Pinterest

text: Internet service providers in India had blocked Pinterest following a Madras High Court order in July 2016 to block a list of around 225 "rogue websites indulging in online piracy and infringement of copyright". The block was temporary.


title: Pinterest

text: In October 2012, Pinterest added a new feature allowing users to report others for negative and offensive activity or block other users if they do not want to view their content, a bid that the company said aimed to keep the site "positive and respectful."


title: Pinterest

text: In December 2018, Pinterest began to take steps to block health misinformation from its recommendations engine, and blocked various searches, content, and user accounts that related to, or promoted, unproved and disproven cancer treatments. The company said it also blocked multiple accounts that linked to external websites that sold supplements and other products that were not scientifically validated. In January 2019, Pinterest stopped returning search results relating to vaccines, in an effort to somehow slow the increase of anti-vaccination content on the platform. Prior to the measure, the company said that the majority of vaccination-related images shared on the platform were anti-vaccination, contradicting the scientific research establishing the safety of vaccines.


title: Pinterest

text: In June 2019, anti-abortion group Live Action was banned from Pinterest; the company said the permanent suspension was imposed for spreading "harmful misinformation, [which] includes medical misinformation and conspiracies that turn individuals and facilities into targets for harassment or violence."


title: Pinterest

text: In December 2019, following a campaign from the activist group Color of Change, Pinterest announced that it would restrict content that advertises wedding events on former slave plantations.


title: Pinterest

text: In 2020, two former Pinterest employees, Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks went public about their experience at Pinterest. Both women recounted experiences of discrimination at work, including racist comments, unequal pay, and punishment for speaking out. Additionally, Ozoma claims that the company failed to protect her when personal information was shared with hate sites by a colleague of hers. In response, Pinterest released an apology statement and CEO Ben Silbermann sent an email to all employees pushing the company to do better.


title: Pinterest

text: In August 2020, hundreds of Pinterest staff participated in a virtual walkout in support of two former colleagues who publicly accused the company of racism and gender discrimination.


title: Pinterest

text: In December 2020, Pinterest agreed to pay its former Chief Operating Officer a record-breaking $20M+ to settle a lawsuit alleging "rampant discrimination, hostile work environment, and misogyny". The settlement was conditional upon Pinterest publicly acknowledging that it must do more to improve its workplace culture.


title: Pinterest

text: In November 2021, Pinterest settled a lawsuit that alleged racial and gender discrimination. The company agreed to pay $50 million on improving its diversity and to release former employees from non-disclosure agreements. The settlement was in regard to allegations made by Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks, who went public in June 2020 with accusations of racism and discrimination at the company.


title: Fibonacci number

text: In mathematics, the Fibonacci numbers, commonly denoted , form a sequence, the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones. The sequence commonly starts from 0 and 1, although some authors start the sequence from 1 and 1 or sometimes (as did Fibonacci) from 1 and 2.


title: Fibonacci number

text: The Fibonacci numbers were first described in Indian mathematics, as early as 200 BC in work by Pingala on enumerating possible patterns of Sanskrit poetry formed from syllables of two lengths. They are named after the Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, later known as Fibonacci, who introduced the sequence to Western European mathematics in his 1202 book "Liber Abaci".


title: Fibonacci number

text: Fibonacci numbers appear unexpectedly often in mathematics, so much so that there is an entire journal dedicated to their study, the "Fibonacci Quarterly". Applications of Fibonacci numbers include computer algorithms such as the Fibonacci search technique and the Fibonacci heap data structure, and graphs called Fibonacci cubes used for interconnecting parallel and distributed systems. They also appear in biological settings, such as branching in trees, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit sprouts of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone's bracts.


title: Fibonacci number

text: Fibonacci numbers are also strongly related to the golden ratio: Binet's formula expresses the th Fibonacci number in terms of and the golden ratio, and implies that the ratio of two consecutive Fibonacci numbers tends to the golden ratio as increases. Fibonacci numbers are also closely related to Lucas numbers, which obey the same recurrence relation and with the Fibonacci numbers form a complementary pair of Lucas sequences.


title: Fibonacci number

text: Under some older definitions, the value formula_3 is omitted, so that the sequence starts with formula_4 and the recurrence formula_5 is valid for .


title: Fibonacci number

text: The Fibonacci sequence appears in Indian mathematics, in connection with Sanskrit prosody. In the Sanskrit poetic tradition, there was interest in enumerating all patterns of long (L) syllables of 2 units duration, juxtaposed with short (S) syllables of 1 unit duration. Counting the different patterns of successive L and S with a given total duration results in the Fibonacci numbers: the number of patterns of duration units is .


title: Fibonacci number

text: Knowledge of the Fibonacci sequence was expressed as early as Pingala ( 450 BC–200 BC). Singh cites Pingala's cryptic formula "misrau cha" ("the two are mixed") and scholars who interpret it in context as saying that the number of patterns for beats () is obtained by adding one [S] to the cases and one [L] to the cases. Bharata Muni also expresses knowledge of the sequence in the "Natya Shastra" (c. 100 BC–c. 350 AD).


title: Fibonacci number

text: However, the clearest exposition of the sequence arises in the work of Virahanka (c. 700 AD), whose own work is lost, but is available in a quotation by Gopala (c. 1135):


title: Fibonacci number

text: Variations of two earlier meters [is the variation]... For example, for [a meter of length] four, variations of meters of two [and] three being mixed, five happens. [works out examples 8, 13, 21]... In this way, the process should be followed in all "mātrā-vṛttas" [prosodic combinations].


title: Fibonacci number

text: Hemachandra (c. 1150) is credited with knowledge of the sequence as well, writing that "the sum of the last and the one before the last is the number ... of the next mātrā-vṛtta."


title: Fibonacci number

text: Outside India, the Fibonacci sequence first appears in the book "Liber Abaci" ("The Book of Calculation", 1202) by Fibonacci where it is used to calculate the growth of rabbit populations. Fibonacci considers the growth of an idealized (biologically unrealistic) rabbit population, assuming that: a newly born breeding pair of rabbits are put in a field; each breeding pair mates at the age of one month, and at the end of their second month they always produce another pair of rabbits; and rabbits never die, but continue breeding forever. Fibonacci posed the puzzle: how many pairs will there be in one year?


title: Fibonacci number

text: At the end of the th month, the number of pairs of rabbits is equal to the number of mature pairs (that is, the number of pairs in month ) plus the number of pairs alive last month (month ). The number in the th month is the th Fibonacci number.


title: Fibonacci number

text: Like every sequence defined by a linear recurrence with constant coefficients, the Fibonacci numbers have a closed-form expression. It has become known as Binet's formula, named after French mathematician Jacques Philippe Marie Binet, though it was already known by Abraham de Moivre and Daniel Bernoulli:


title: Fibonacci number

text: To see the relation between the sequence and these constants, note that and are both solutions of the equation


title: Fibonacci number

text: If and are chosen so that and then the resulting sequence must be the Fibonacci sequence. This is the same as requiring and satisfy the system of equations:


title: Fibonacci number

text: for all , the number is the closest integer to formula_22. Therefore, it can be found by rounding, using the nearest integer function:


title: Fibonacci number

text: As the floor function is monotonic, the latter formula can be inverted for finding the index of the smallest Fibonacci number that is not less than a positive integer :


title: Fibonacci number

text: Since "F" is asymptotic to formula_29, the number of digits in "F" is asymptotic to formula_30. As a consequence, for every integer "d" > 1 there are either 4 or 5 Fibonacci numbers with "d" decimal digits.


title: Fibonacci number

text: More generally, in the base "b" representation, the number of digits in "F" is asymptotic to formula_31


title: Fibonacci number

text: Johannes Kepler observed that the ratio of consecutive Fibonacci numbers converges. He wrote that "as 5 is to 8 so is 8 to 13, practically, and as 8 is to 13, so is 13 to 21 almost", and concluded that these ratios approach the golden ratio formula_32


title: Fibonacci number

text: This convergence holds regardless of the starting values formula_34 and formula_35, unless formula_36. This can be verified using Binet's formula. For example, the initial values 3 and 2 generate the sequence 3, 2, 5, 7, 12, 19, 31, 50, 81, 131, 212, 343, 555, ... The ratio of consecutive terms in this sequence shows the same convergence towards the golden ratio.


title: Fibonacci number

text: In general, formula_37, because the ratios between consecutive Fibonacci numbers approaches formula_38.


title: Fibonacci number

text: this expression can be used to decompose higher powers formula_40 as a linear function of lower powers, which in turn can be decomposed all the way down to a linear combination of formula_38 and 1. The resulting recurrence relationships yield Fibonacci numbers as the linear coefficients:


title: Fibonacci number

text: These expressions are also true for if the Fibonacci sequence "F" is extended to negative integers using the Fibonacci rule formula_47


title: Fibonacci number

text: Binet's formula provides a proof that a positive integer "x" is a Fibonacci number if and only if at least one of formula_48 or formula_49 is a perfect square. This is because Binet's formula, which can be written as formula_50, can be multiplied by formula_51 and solved as a quadratic equation in formula_40 via the quadratic formula:


title: Fibonacci number

text: which yields formula_58. The eigenvalues of the matrix are formula_59 and formula_60 corresponding to the respective eigenvectors


title: Fibonacci number

text: Equivalently, the same computation may performed by diagonalization of through use of its eigendecomposition:


title: Fibonacci number

text: This property can be understood in terms of the continued fraction representation for the golden ratio:


title: Fibonacci number

text: The Fibonacci numbers occur as the ratio of successive convergents of the continued fraction for , and the matrix formed from successive convergents of any continued fraction has a determinant of +1 or −1. The matrix representation gives the following closed-form expression for the Fibonacci numbers:


title: Fibonacci number

text: For a given , this matrix can be computed in arithmetic operations, using the exponentiation by squaring method.


title: Fibonacci number

text: Moreover, since for any square matrix , the following identities can be derived (they are obtained from two different coefficients of the matrix product, and one may easily deduce the second one from the first one by changing into ),


title: Fibonacci number

text: These last two identities provide a way to compute Fibonacci numbers recursively in arithmetic operations and in time , where is the time for the multiplication of two numbers of digits. This matches the time for computing the th Fibonacci number from the closed-form matrix formula, but with fewer redundant steps if one avoids recomputing an already computed Fibonacci number (recursion with memoization).


title: Fibonacci number

text: Most identities involving Fibonacci numbers can be proved using combinatorial arguments using the fact that formula_76 can be interpreted as the number of [possibly empty] sequences of 1s and 2s whose sum is formula_77. This can be taken as the definition of formula_78 with the conventions formula_79, meaning no such sequence exists whose sum is −1, and formula_80, meaning the empty sequence "adds up" to 0. In the following, formula_81 is the cardinality of a set:


title: Fibonacci number

text: may be understood by dividing the formula_78 sequences into two non-overlapping sets where all sequences either begin with 1 or 2:


title: Fibonacci number

text: Excluding the first element, the remaining terms in each sequence sum to formula_91 or formula_92 and the cardinality of each set is formula_93 or formula_94 giving a total of formula_95 sequences, showing this is equal to formula_78.


title: Fibonacci number

text: In a similar manner it may be shown that the sum of the first Fibonacci numbers up to the "n"th is equal to the ("n" + 2)-nd Fibonacci number minus 1. In symbols:


title: Fibonacci number

text: This may be seen by dividing all sequences summing to formula_98 based on the location of the first 2. Specifically, each set consists of those sequences that start formula_99 until the last two sets formula_100 each with cardinality 1.


title: Fibonacci number

text: A similar argument, grouping the sums by the position of the first 1 rather than the first 2 gives two more identities:


title: Fibonacci number

text: In words, the sum of the first Fibonacci numbers with odd index up to formula_106 is the (2"n")th Fibonacci number, and the sum of the first Fibonacci numbers with even index up to formula_107 is the (2"n" + 1)th Fibonacci number minus 1.


title: Fibonacci number

text: or in words, the sum of the squares of the first Fibonacci numbers up to formula_78 is the product of the "n"th and ("n" + 1)th Fibonacci numbers. To see this, begin with a Fibonacci rectangle of size formula_110 and decompose it into squares of size formula_111; from this the identity follows by comparing areas:


title: Fibonacci number

text: The sequence formula_112 is also considered using the symbolic method. More precisely, this sequence corresponds to a specifiable combinatorial class. The specification of this sequence is formula_113. Indeed, as stated above, the formula_114-th Fibonacci number equals the number of combinatorial compositions (ordered partitions) of formula_77 using terms 1 and 2.


title: Fibonacci number

text: It follows that the ordinary generating function of the Fibonacci sequence, i.e. formula_116, is the complex function formula_117.


title: Fibonacci number

text: where "L" is the "n"'th Lucas number. The last is an identity for doubling "n"; other identities of this type are


title: Fibonacci number

text: These can be found experimentally using lattice reduction, and are useful in setting up the special number field sieve to factorize a Fibonacci number.


title: Fibonacci number

text: formula_151 gives the generating function for the negafibonacci numbers, and formula_152 satisfies the functional equation


title: Fibonacci number

text: Infinite sums over reciprocal Fibonacci numbers can sometimes be evaluated in terms of theta functions. For example, the sum of every odd-indexed reciprocal Fibonacci number can be written as


title: Fibonacci number

text: Every third number of the sequence is even (a multiple of formula_163) and, more generally, every "k"th number of the sequence is a multiple of "F". Thus the Fibonacci sequence is an example of a divisibility sequence. In fact, the Fibonacci sequence satisfies the stronger divisibility property


title: Fibonacci number

text: In particular, any three consecutive Fibonacci numbers are pairwise coprime because both formula_165 and formula_166. That is,


title: Fibonacci number

text: Every prime number "p" divides a Fibonacci number that can be determined by the value of "p" modulo 5. If "p" is congruent to 1 or 4 (mod 5), then "p" divides "F", and if "p" is congruent to 2 or 3 (mod 5), then, "p" divides "F". The remaining case is that "p" = 5, and in this case "p" divides "F".


title: Fibonacci number

text: where the Legendre symbol has been replaced by the Jacobi symbol, then this is evidence that "n" is a prime, and if it fails to hold, then "n" is definitely not a prime. If "n" is composite and satisfies the formula, then "n" is a "Fibonacci pseudoprime". When "m" is largesay a 500-bit numberthen we can calculate "F" (mod "n") efficiently using the matrix form. Thus


title: Fibonacci number

text: Here the matrix power "A" is calculated using modular exponentiation, which can be adapted to matrices.


title: Fibonacci number

text: Fibonacci primes with thousands of digits have been found, but it is not known whether there are infinitely many.


title: Fibonacci number

text: "F" is divisible by "F", so, apart from "F" = 3, any Fibonacci prime must have a prime index. As there are arbitrarily long runs of composite numbers, there are therefore also arbitrarily long runs of composite Fibonacci numbers.


title: Fibonacci number

text: The only nontrivial square Fibonacci number is 144. Attila Pethő proved in 2001 that there is only a finite number of perfect power Fibonacci numbers. In 2006, Y. Bugeaud, M. Mignotte, and S. Siksek proved that 8 and 144 are the only such non-trivial perfect powers.


title: Fibonacci number

text: 1, 3, 21, and 55 are the only triangular Fibonacci numbers, which was conjectured by Vern Hoggatt and proved by Luo Ming.


title: Fibonacci number

text: No Fibonacci number can be a perfect number. More generally, no Fibonacci number other than 1 can be multiply perfect, and no ratio of two Fibonacci numbers can be perfect.


title: Fibonacci number

text: With the exceptions of 1, 8 and 144 ("F" = "F", "F" and "F") every Fibonacci number has a prime factor that is not a factor of any smaller Fibonacci number (Carmichael's theorem). As a result, 8 and 144 ("F" and "F") are the only Fibonacci numbers that are the product of other Fibonacci numbers.


title: Fibonacci number

text: The divisibility of Fibonacci numbers by a prime "p" is related to the Legendre symbol formula_172 which is evaluated as follows:


title: Fibonacci number

text: For odd "n", all odd prime divisors of "F" are congruent to 1 modulo 4, implying that all odd divisors of "F" (as the products of odd prime divisors) are congruent to 1 modulo 4.


title: Fibonacci number

text: All known factors of Fibonacci numbers "F"("i") for all "i" < 50000 are collected at the relevant repositories.


title: Fibonacci number

text: If the members of the Fibonacci sequence are taken mod "n", the resulting sequence is periodic with period at most "6n". The lengths of the periods for various "n" form the so-called Pisano periods. Determining a general formula for the Pisano periods is an open problem, which includes as a subproblem a special instance of the problem of finding the multiplicative order of a modular integer or of an element in a finite field. However, for any particular "n", the Pisano period may be found as an instance of cycle detection.


title: Fibonacci number

text: The Fibonacci sequence is one of the simplest and earliest known sequences defined by a recurrence relation, and specifically by a linear difference equation. All these sequences may be viewed as generalizations of the Fibonacci sequence. In particular, Binet's formula may be generalized to any sequence that is a solution of a homogeneous linear difference equation with constant coefficients.


title: Fibonacci number

text: The Fibonacci numbers occur in the sums of "shallow" diagonals in Pascal's triangle (see binomial coefficient):


title: Fibonacci number

text: These numbers also give the solution to certain enumerative problems, the most common of which is that of counting the number of ways of writing a given number as an ordered sum of 1s and 2s (called compositions); there are ways to do this (equivalently, it's also the number of domino tilings of the formula_195 rectangle). For example, there are ways one can climb a staircase of 5 steps, taking one or two steps at a time:


title: Fibonacci number

text: The figure shows that 8 can be decomposed into 5 (the number of ways to climb 4 steps, followed by a single-step) plus 3 (the number of ways to climb 3 steps, followed by a double-step). The same reasoning is applied recursively until a single step, of which there is only one way to climb.


title: Fibonacci number

text: The Fibonacci numbers can be found in different ways among the set of binary strings, or equivalently, among the subsets of a given set.


title: Fibonacci number

text: Fibonacci sequences appear in biological settings, such as branching in trees, arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruitlets of a pineapple, the flowering of artichoke, an uncurling fern and the arrangement of a pine cone, and the family tree of honeybees. Kepler pointed out the presence of the Fibonacci sequence in nature, using it to explain the (golden ratio-related) pentagonal form of some flowers. Field daisies most often have petals in counts of Fibonacci numbers. In 1830, K. F. Schimper and A. Braun discovered that the parastichies (spiral phyllotaxis) of plants were frequently expressed as fractions involving Fibonacci numbers.


title: Fibonacci number

text: Przemysław Prusinkiewicz advanced the idea that real instances can in part be understood as the expression of certain algebraic constraints on free groups, specifically as certain Lindenmayer grammars.


title: Fibonacci number

text: A model for the pattern of florets in the head of a sunflower was proposed by in 1979. This has the form


title: Fibonacci number

text: where is the index number of the floret and is a constant scaling factor; the florets thus lie on Fermat's spiral. The divergence angle, approximately 137.51°, is the golden angle, dividing the circle in the golden ratio. Because this ratio is irrational, no floret has a neighbor at exactly the same angle from the center, so the florets pack efficiently. Because the rational approximations to the golden ratio are of the form , the nearest neighbors of floret number are those at for some index , which depends on , the distance from the center. Sunflowers and similar flowers most commonly have spirals of florets in clockwise and counter-clockwise directions in the amount of adjacent Fibonacci numbers, typically counted by the outermost range of radii.


title: Fibonacci number

text: Fibonacci numbers also appear in the pedigrees of idealized honeybees, according to the following rules:


title: Fibonacci number

text: Thus, a male bee always has one parent, and a female bee has two. If one traces the pedigree of any male bee (1 bee), he has 1 parent (1 bee), 2 grandparents, 3 great-grandparents, 5 great-great-grandparents, and so on. This sequence of numbers of parents is the Fibonacci sequence. The number of ancestors at each level, , is the number of female ancestors, which is , plus the number of male ancestors, which is . This is under the unrealistic assumption that the ancestors at each level are otherwise unrelated.


title: Fibonacci number

text: It has been noticed that the number of possible ancestors on the human X chromosome inheritance line at a given ancestral generation also follows the Fibonacci sequence. A male individual has an X chromosome, which he received from his mother, and a Y chromosome, which he received from his father. The male counts as the "origin" of his own X chromosome (formula_165), and at his parents' generation, his X chromosome came from a single parent (formula_199). The male's mother received one X chromosome from her mother (the son's maternal grandmother), and one from her father (the son's maternal grandfather), so two grandparents contributed to the male descendant's X chromosome (formula_163). The maternal grandfather received his X chromosome from his mother, and the maternal grandmother received X chromosomes from both of her parents, so three great-grandparents contributed to the male descendant's X chromosome (formula_201). Five great-great-grandparents contributed to the male descendant's X chromosome (formula_202), etc. (This assumes that all ancestors of a given descendant are independent, but if any genealogy is traced far enough back in time, ancestors begin to appear on multiple lines of the genealogy, until eventually a population founder appears on all lines of the genealogy.)


title: Slovakia

text: Slovakia (; ), officially the Slovak Republic ( ), is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east, Hungary to the south, Austria to the southwest, and the Czech Republic to the northwest. Slovakia's mostly mountainous territory spans about , with a population of over 5.4 million. The capital and largest city is Bratislava, while the second largest city is Košice.


title: Slovakia

text: The Slavs arrived in the territory of present-day Slovakia in the fifth and sixth centuries. In the seventh century, they played a significant role in the creation of Samo's Empire. In the ninth century, they established the Principality of Nitra, which was later conquered by the Principality of Moravia to establish Great Moravia. In the 10th century, after the dissolution of Great Moravia, the territory was integrated into the Principality of Hungary, which then became the Kingdom of Hungary in 1000. In 1241 and 1242, after the Mongol invasion of Europe, much of the territory was destroyed. The area was recovered largely thanks to Béla IV of Hungary, who also settled Germans, leading them to become an important ethnic group in the area, especially in what are today parts of central and eastern Slovakia.


title: Slovakia

text: After World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the state of Czechoslovakia was established. It was the only country in central and eastern Europe to remain a democracy during the interwar period. Nevertheless, local fascist parties gradually came to power in the Slovak lands, and the first Slovak Republic existed during World War II as a partially-recognised client state of Nazi Germany. At the end of World War II, Czechoslovakia was re-established as an independent country. After a coup in 1948, Czechoslovakia came under communist administration, and became a part of the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc. Attempts to liberalise communism in Czechoslovakia culminated in the Prague Spring, which was crushed by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. In 1989, the Velvet Revolution peacefully ended the Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. Slovakia became an independent state on 1 January 1993 after the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia, sometimes known as the Velvet Divorce.


title: Slovakia

text: Slovakia is a developed country with an advanced high-income economy, ranking very high in the Human Development Index. It also performs favourably in measurements of civil liberties, press freedom, internet freedom, democratic governance, and peacefulness. The country maintains a combination of a market economy with a comprehensive social security system, providing citizens with a universal health care, free education, and one of the longest paid parental leaves in the OECD. Slovakia is a member of the European Union, the Eurozone, the Schengen Area, the United Nations, NATO, CERN, the OECD, the WTO, the Council of Europe, the Visegrád Group, and the OSCE. Slovakia is also home to eight UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The world's largest per-capita car producer, Slovakia manufactured a total of 1.1 million cars in 2019, representing 43% of its total industrial output.


title: Slovakia

text: Slovakia's name in theory means the "Land of the Slavs" ("Slovensko" in Slovak stemming from the older form "Sloven/Slovienin"). As such, it is a cognate of the words Slovenia and Slavonia. In medieval Latin, German, and even some Slavic sources, the same name has often been used for Slovaks, Slovenes, Slavonians, and Slavs in general. According to one of the theories, a new form of national name formed for the ancestors of the Slovaks between the 13th and 14th century, possibly due to foreign influence; the Czech word "Slovák" (in medieval sources from 1291 onward). This form slowly replaced the name for the male members of the community, but the female name ("Slovenka"), reference to the lands inhabited ("Slovensko") and the name of the language ("slovenčina") all remained the same, with their base in the older form (compare to Slovenian counterparts). Most foreign translations tend to stem from this newer form ("Slovakia" in English, "Slowakei" in German, "Slovaquie" in French, etc.).


title: Slovakia

text: In medieval Latin sources, terms Slavus, Slavonia, or Slavorum (and more variants, from as early as 1029) have been used. In German sources, names for the Slovak lands were Windenland or Windische Lande (early 15th century), with the forms "Slovakia" and "Schlowakei" starting to appear in the 16th century. The present Slovak form "Slovensko" is first attested in the year 1675.


title: Slovakia

text: The oldest surviving human artefacts from Slovakia are found near Nové Mesto nad Váhom and are dated at 270,000 BCE, in the Early Paleolithic era. These ancient tools, made by the Clactonian technique, bear witness to the ancient habitation of Slovakia.


title: Slovakia

text: Other stone tools from the Middle Paleolithic era (200,000–80,000 BCE) come from the Prévôt (Prepoštská) cave in Bojnice and from other nearby sites. The most important discovery from that era is a Neanderthal cranium (c. 200,000 BCE), discovered near Gánovce, a village in northern Slovakia.


title: Slovakia

text: Archaeologists have found prehistoric human skeletons in the region, as well as numerous objects and vestiges of the Gravettian culture, principally in the river valleys of Nitra, Hron, Ipeľ, Váh and as far as the city of Žilina, and near the foot of the Vihorlat, Inovec, and Tribeč mountains, as well as in the Myjava Mountains. The most well-known finds include the oldest female statue made of mammoth bone (22,800 BCE), the famous Venus of Moravany. The statue was found in the 1940s in Moravany nad Váhom near Piešťany. Numerous necklaces made of shells from Cypraca thermophile gastropods of the Tertiary period have come from the sites of Zákovská, Podkovice, Hubina, and Radošina. These findings provide the most ancient evidence of commercial exchanges carried out between the Mediterranean and Central Europe.


title: Slovakia

text: During the Bronze Age, the geographical territory of modern-day Slovakia went through three stages of development, stretching from 2000 to 800 BCE. Major cultural, economic, and political development can be attributed to the significant growth in production of copper, especially in central Slovakia (for example in Špania Dolina) and northwest Slovakia. Copper became a stable source of prosperity for the local population.


title: Slovakia

text: After the disappearance of the Čakany and Velatice cultures, the Lusatian people expanded building of strong and complex fortifications, with the large permanent buildings and administrative centres. Excavations of Lusatian hill forts document the substantial development of trade and agriculture at that period. The richness and diversity of tombs increased considerably. The inhabitants of the area manufactured arms, shields, jewellery, dishes, and statues.


title: Slovakia

text: The arrival of tribes from Thrace disrupted the people of the Kalenderberg culture, who lived in the hamlets located on the plain (Sereď) and in the hill forts like Molpír, near Smolenice, in the Little Carpathians. During Hallstatt times, monumental burial mounds were erected in western Slovakia, with princely equipment consisting of richly decorated vessels, ornaments and decorations. The burial rites consisted entirely of cremation. Common people were buried in flat urnfield cemeteries.


title: Slovakia

text: A special role was given to weaving and the production of textiles. The local power of the "Princes" of the Hallstatt period disappeared in Slovakia during the century before the middle of first millennium BC, after strife between the Scytho-Thracian people and locals, resulting in abandonment of the old hill-forts. Relatively depopulated areas soon caught the interest of emerging Celtic tribes, who advanced from the south towards the north, following the Slovak rivers, peacefully integrating into the remnants of the local population.


title: Slovakia

text: From around 500 BCE, the territory of modern-day Slovakia was settled by Celts, who built powerful "oppida" on the sites of modern-day Bratislava and Devín. Biatecs, silver coins with inscriptions in the Latin alphabet, represent the first known use of writing in Slovakia. At the northern regions, remnants of the local population of Lusatian origin, together with Celtic and later Dacian influence, gave rise to the unique Púchov culture, with advanced crafts and iron-working, many hill-forts and fortified settlements of central type with the coinage of the "Velkobysterecky" type (no inscriptions, with a horse on one side and a head on the other). This culture is often connected with the Celtic tribe mentioned in Roman sources as Cotini.