Word: mathematician
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Mathematician Edward Kasner, 59, of Columbia University, is one of the mythical baker's dozen of savants who were supposed to be the only men in the world able to understand the Einstein theory of relativity. At Harvard's Tercentenary celebration in 1936, he showed how to bisect a "horn angle" (an angle formed by two curves tangent to each other), a problem which had stumped mathematicians for 2,000-odd years. His fun: talking to children...
...Mathematician Kasner wasn't fooling...
...called The Meaning QJ Meaning, followed by Ogden's invention of an 850-word vocabulary called Basic English. Indicative of the complexity of semantics is the fact that while Ogden is an orthologist and psychologist and Richards is an esthetician, important contributions have been made by a Polish mathematician, Count Alfred Korzybski, and a Harvard physicist, Percy Williams Bridgman. Semantics ranges from the equator of Basic English through the lush tropics of political bunkum to the North Pole of James Joyce's word-coining...
...discovery of the planet Pluto whose existence and probable orbit were indicated by irregularities in the orbits of other planets. So, too, deuterium (heavy hydrogen) was identified because its discoverer already had intimations of its existence, and the positive electron was foreshadowed in the cogitations of at least one mathematician before its track turned up in the laboratory. In fact, some things are made use of even before they are discovered - e.g., the little uncharged particle called the neutrino which atomic physicists need in their calculations but which has never yet come to light experimentally. Quite different are unexpected...
Hailed as a "great textbook," this volume was so successful in & out of the university that other faculty members followed suit: Walter Bartky with Highlights of Astronomy; Mayme I. Logsden with A Mathematician Explains; Geologists Carey Croneis and William Krumbein with Down to Earth. Pioneer Lemon, who thus has the distinction of starting a whole popularization movement within his university, now plans to write a few serious publications to satisfy sticklers among his colleagues, spend the rest of his life composing "funny books" like From Galileo to Cosmic Rays-one of them, soon to be published, a breezy discussion...