Word: ageing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...time he "left" at the age of 83, in 1996, Erdos had collaborated with an unprecedented 485 colleagues. Other mathematicians simply solved problems; Erdos solved problems and pushed at least four generations to dig deeper into the mysterious nature of numbers...
...Maker of more than 150 films, beginning with his Oscar-winning The Silent World in 1956, Cousteau revealed a flotilla of wondrous creatures to an audience that was instantly entranced. In his last book, Man, Octopus and Orchid, published shortly after his death in 1997 at the age of 87, Cousteau summed up his long career with a powerful denunciation of ocean pollution, nuclear energy and overfishing. Though some ecologists lamented his late-blooming commitment to their cause, and professional scientists questioned the credentials of this self-taught oceanographer, their carping paled next to Cousteau's towering lifetime achievements--crowned...
...woman anthropologist, Margaret Mead was an American icon. On dozens of field trips to study the ways of primitive societies, she found evidence to support her strong belief that cultural conditioning, not genetics, molded human behavior. That theme was struck most forcefully in Mead's 1928 classic, Coming of Age in Samoa. It described an idyllic pre-industrial society, free of sexual restraint and devoid of violence, guilt and anger. Her portrait of free-loving primitives shocked contemporaries and inspired generations of college students--especially during the 1960s sexual revolution. But it may have been too good to be true...
Steptoe, who witnessed many of these changes before his death at 74, in 1988, was an unlikely revolutionary. Born to a church organist father and social-service worker mother in rural Oxfordshire, he decided at an early age to pursue medicine over music. During World War II, he was captured by the Italians after his ship was sunk and got himself tossed into solitary for helping other prisoners escape. Setting up a practice in obstetrics and gynecology after the war, he raised professional eyebrows by pioneering a newfangled fiber-optic device called a laparoscope to perform minimally invasive abdominal surgery...
Born to prosperous Jewish parents in Budapest in 1903, Von Neumann was a child prodigy who could divide eight-digit numbers in his head by age six, learned calculus by age eight and amused his parents' friends by glancing at a phone book and reciting whole pages verbatim. Mathematics quickly became the focus of his studies, culminating in a Ph.D. from the University of Budapest at the age...