Word: mathematician
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...inventing automatic machines. Dr. Claude E. Shannon of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, said that automatic computers had been devised that "could play a tolerably good game of checkers, translate crudely from one language to another and learn from experience as higher animals do." He reported that John Von Newman, mathematician of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N. J. had built an abstract model machine that could reproduce itself...
...strange lexicon of Communist crimes, Moscow last week added a new one with a classic heritage: Pythagorism. The original culprit: Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher-mathematician (circa 582-507 B.C.) known to schoolboys as the geometric genius who first pinned down the proposition that the square on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides...
...years the Rt. Rev. Ernest William Barnes, bishop of Birmingham, has been the Church of England's foremost champion of religious heterodoxy. A mathematician in his youth, he has spent most of his life in holy orders, trying, as he put it, to make the beliefs of the Christian religion "come to terms with science and scholarship." For Bishop Barnes, this involved repudiating the virgin birth of Christ ("a crude, semipagan story"), the existence of Adam and Eve, and such biblical accounts as Jonah and the whale and Noah's ark. He does not believe in miracles-whether...
...those who knew him well, the Rev. Charles L. Dodgson of Oxford University was a confusing fellow. Sometimes he was a stammering mathematician, who lectured so ploddingly that he often had to threaten his students with an extra assignment of "lines" to get them to class. At other times he became Mr. Lewis Carroll, the man who wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and had a passion for kittens and children. Last week a Welsh professor reported some curious evidence about a third Mr. Dodgson-the curator of the Christ Church Senior Common Room...
...professor, Economist Duncan Black, happened to be investigating Mathematician Dodgson's theories in a political field-proportional representation. One day, in a cupboard of the Christ Church treasury, he came across "row upon row of green clothbound boxes, all neatly packed with envelopes." Inside were the meticulous records of Dodgson's entire ten-year curatorship. Apparently, not one of them had been opened since the day he retired...