Word: ende
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...reinforced concrete. Torroja is fond of walking his institute visitors under the sickle-shaped ribs of the pergola that spring from the outside wall and curve elegantly overhead like jets of water frozen in a high wind, explaining with professional pride that they are actually "Bernoullian lemniscates* with zero end curvature." Says Torroja, "Every mathematical curve has a nature of its own, the accuracy of a law, the expression of an idea, the evidence of a virtue...
...strictly raised for his profession by his father, an art expert and critic. At twelve, the boy was required not only to identify art styles at a glance, but also to imitate them precisely on paper. "Father smoked so much at my drawing sessions," he recalls, "that by the end of the day I couldn't see him across the studio. He was like Zeus on a dais; you had to cut through clouds...
M.I.T.'s good judgment laid the base for the public's extraordinary confidence in the entire industry. When M.I.T. was founded in 1924, it startled the financial world with a brand new idea. Until then, the investment field had been dominated by "closed-end" investment companies; they sold a specific number of their own shares that were traded in the open market, concentrated on quick profits. M.I.T. shunned the lure of the fast profit, concentrated on long-term gains. More important, it threw out the closed-end idea by continually selling shares to anyone who wanted...
When the 1929 crash came, the closed-end shareholders were forced to dump their shares in a sinking market at prices that had no relation to their real value. Their companies went down to disaster-while the mutual funds rode out the storm. The debacle of the closed-end trusts was helped by all sorts of financial jiggery-pokery; in some companies, officers unloaded their own holdings of shaky stocks on the trusts...
M.I.T. helped put an end to all that. Despite howls from the financial world, it opened its books and portfolio of stocks to the public, setting the pattern for the "fishbowl" policy under which the whole fund industry now operates. Instead of fighting New Deal legislation aimed at regulating investment-company practices, it recognized the need for regulation, helped the New Deal frame the laws. So similar were M.I.T.'s bylaws to the Investment Company Act of 1940, which laid the ground rules for the funds, that M.I.T. had to change only a few commas...