Word: censuses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week, as the Census Bureau organized its 1940 figures, a Harvard mathematician was studying a still unsolved problem in algebra unwittingly posed by the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The Constitution says: "Representatives ... shall be apportioned among the several States ... according to their respective numbers . . . but each State shall have at least one Representative." "This problem," points out Harvard Mathematician Edward Vermilye Huntington, "has worried Congress into a state of great perplexity and bitter debate after every decennial census for over a hundred years." In a 41-page Senate Document he recently tackled the problem...
Example (from the 1920 census): New York had 42 seats, each representing 247,157 people, Vermont had two seats, each representing 176,214 people-a difference between districts of 40%. But if a seat were transferred from Vermont to New York, the difference would be not decreased but increased to 46%. So no transfer should be made. In short, Dr. Huntington aims not to abolish inequalities, which is impossible, but to keep them to a mathematical minimum...
...defense boom was shooting up faster than anywhere else in the U. S. From Georgia's Tobacco Roads through the Mississippi Delta out to the oil and cattle country in West Texas, there was many a town which had doubled in population since last spring's census, many a village which had multiplied so many times over that no one could keep track. New towns had sprung up where none had been before. Farmers left their land to work on construction at wages up to $90 a week; some of them made more money in a single month...
Camp Towns. Alexandria nestles behind a levee on the Red River in the middle of Louisiana. On hills bordering the river valley near by, five Army camps were going up last week. In last spring's census, Alexandria had a population of 27,066. By last week this figure had jumped to somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000. Construction of the camps had employed 25,000 men regularly since last September; in one peak week 30,000 were at work. Rooming houses and small hotels had waiting lists twice as big as their capacities. Some of them were...
Founder Wright was an infant prodigy. Born in Massachusetts, he was reciting Greek and Latin to Williams College professors before he was ten. When his father took him west to keep the books of The Prairie Store, young Wright spent his spare time taking Chicago's first census, publishing the first lithographed map of the little town. He lost his first fortune (in the panic of 1837) when he was 22, started Prairie Farmer on a shoestring...