Word: englands
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Wittgenstein returned to Austria to become a schoolteacher. But the worm of doubt soon gnawed, and he returned to England in 1929 to declare dramatically that he had got it all wrong the first time. The "later Wittgenstein" spent the next 18 years agonizing in front of a small Cambridge seminar of devoted and transfixed students, who posed curious questions that he then answered--or pointedly did not answer--with wonderfully austere if often enigmatic aphorisms. An obsessive perfectionist, Wittgenstein worked and reworked his notes and left his second masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations, for posthumous publication in 1953. Both books will...
...Mathison Turing was born in London in 1912, the second of his parents' two sons. His father was a member of the British civil service in India, an environment that his mother considered unsuitable for her boys. So John and Alan Turing spent their childhood in foster households in England, separated from their parents except for occasional visits back home. Alan's loneliness during this period may have inspired his lifelong interest in the operations of the human mind, how it can create a world when the world it is given proves barren or unsatisfactory...
...Francis Crick walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge, England, and, as James Watson later recalled, announced that "we had found the secret of life." Actually, they had. That morning, Watson and Crick had figured out the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. And that structure--a "double helix" that can "unzip" to make copies of itself--confirmed suspicions that DNA carries life's hereditary information...
...easily radio waves can be bounced off almost any object. In 1925 physicists took advantage of this, firing signals at the ionosphere and using the reflection to measure its altitude. By World War II, British scientists had refined the technology, and the government began to dot the coast of England with civil-defense radar stations. As the hardware got simpler, radar found its way into airplanes, boats and air-traffic-control towers, improving navigation and ensuring that even a cow-pasture airport could operate safely. By the end of the century, the same basic technology was being used to steer...
...Hardy took the time to decipher the young man's idiosyncratic scrawls and realized he was corresponding with a genius. Unlike trained mathematicians, Ramanujan knew his speculations about numbers were true, so he didn't bother to prove them. That wouldn't do. Hardy brought him to England in 1914, and the pair spent four years working to prove the self-taught mathematician's intuitively brilliant conjectures. Alas, Ramanujan hated England and died of tuberculosis in 1920 at age 32--with so much of his opus left unproved that mathematicians today are still working...