Word: london
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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William Bradford Shockley was born in London, where his father, a mining engineer, and mother, a mineral surveyor, were on a business assignment. Home-schooled in Palo Alto, Calif., before attending Palo Alto Military Academy and Hollywood High School, he found his interest in physics sparked by a neighbor who taught the subject at Stanford University. Shockley earned a bachelor's degree from Caltech, and a Ph.D. at M.I.T. for a dissertation titled "Calculations of Wave Functions for Electrons in Sodium Chloride Crystals...
...concept--a fairly rudimentary assemblage of hardware performing prodigious and multifaceted tasks according to the dictates of the instructions fed to it--sound familiar? It certainly didn't in 1937, when Turing's seminal paper, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem," appeared in Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. Turing's thoughts were recognized by the few readers capable of understanding them as theoretically interesting, even provocative. But no one recognized that Turing's machine provided a blueprint for what would eventually become the electronic digital computer...
Alan 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...
Fatefully, such amity did not prevail at a laboratory over at King's College, London, where a woman named Rosalind Franklin was creating the world's best X-ray diffraction pictures of DNA. Maurice Wilkins, a colleague who was also working on DNA, disliked the precociously feminist Franklin, and the feeling was mutual. By Watson's account, this estrangement led Wilkins to show Watson one of Franklin's best pictures yet, which hadn't been published. "The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open," Watson recalled. The sneak preview "gave several of the vital helical parameters...
Raised in London in the 1960s, Berners-Lee was the quintessential child of the computer age. His parents met while working on the Ferranti Mark I, the first computer sold commercially. They taught him to think unconventionally; he'd play games over the breakfast table with imaginary numbers (what's the square root of minus 4?). He made pretend computers out of cardboard boxes and five-hole paper tape and fell in love with electronics. Later, at Oxford, he built his own working electronic computer out of spare parts and a TV set. He also studied physics, which he thought...