Word: inventive
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...Tofflers didn't invent futurism, of course. H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and George Orwell were all practicing futurists working under a science-fiction guise. Fittingly, perhaps, modern futurism was born with the atom bomb, in that moment in history when it was suddenly possible to imagine a world without a future. It was Herman Kahn, a graduate of the Rand Institute, the Ur-think tank, who gave the nascent profession credibility with such groundbreaking books as Thinking About the Unthinkable (1962), which used sound scientific principles to predict with great specificity the likely effects of a thermonuclear...
...vision of the future dominated sci-fi during the late '80s. Its seminal work was the 1984 classic Neuromancer, by William Gibson, who never was happy being pigeonholed as a cyberpunk writer. "It wasn't our term," he says. "It's one of those labels." And although he did invent the word cyberspace, says Gibson, "I had to spend years and years figuring out what it meant." In the past few years, cyberpunk has lost some of its glitter, perhaps because cruising the Net has become so commonplace...
Witten didn't invent superstring theory, which posits that the basic building blocks of nature are not tiny particles but unimaginably small loops and snippets of what loosely resembles string--except that the string exists in a bizarre, 10-dimensional universe. The current version of the theory took shape in the late 1960s, when the tall, thin, shy, wispy-voiced scientist was still an undergraduate at Brandeis...
...enough, there was what I'd been looking for: Lebesgue, H., Lecons sur l'Integration, a set of lectures directed at the very question I'd been asking myself. Lebesgue approached the question historically. He began by explaining how Archimedes, in the third century B.C., had been led to invent integration. Then he explained why 17th-century mathematicians had been forced to improve Archimedes' definition and what had led their successors to invent further improvements and generalizations. Now, finally, I understood the Lebesgue integral. More important, I had discovered that you need to know the history of an idea...
...Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: Her Fake Book"; Linsey C. Marr '96 for "A Flourescent Torchiere and Energy Savings at Harvard"; Jeremy L. Martin '96 for "The Mathieu Group M12 and Conway's M13-Game"; and Andrew L. Wright '96 for "'The Seeds of History, the License to Invent': Torquato Tasso Between History and Fiction...