Word: mathematician
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...SCRIPT IS full of comic routines and caustic one-liners. Humor is the basis of the characters' lives, providing them with accurate insight and comfortable escape. Norman, the straight mathematician, and Shelley, his spacey girlfriend, are clearly self-parodies. Mike and Cootie, a Rosenkrantz-and-Guildenstern type duo, are careful, conscious performers. But other characters are confused about the interpretation of their lines. When Kathy has problems with her boyfriend, she complains...
Sifting through old papers in a Dutch astronomy laboratory, scientists came across an unexpected treasure: 17 letters and postcards written by Albert Einstein between 1916 and 1918 to his friend the Dutch astronomer and mathematician Willem de Sitter. The discovery, reported in Nature, reveals an esoteric interchange between the two men about the theory of relativity. Einstein's observations range from the specific (he computed the radius of the universe as R=10' lightyears) to the metaphoric ("I compare space to a cloth ...") to the peevish ("Your solution corresponds to no physical possibility"). But the two scholars...
...their islands every year were caused by the casual movements of a great spider that carried the earth on its back. Natives of Siberia's quake-prone Kamchatka Peninsula blamed the tremors on a giant dog named Kosei tossing snow off his fur. Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher and mathematician, believed that earthquakes were caused by the dead fighting among themselves. Another ancient Greek, Aristotle, had a more scientific explanation. He contended that the earth's rumblings were the result of hot air masses trying to escape from the earth's interior...
With their usual savvy in separating reality from official propaganda, ordinary Russians seemed to recognize that the joint flight was as much a diplomatic exercise as a technological feat, and they were divided on its value. One launch watcher at the GUM store, Valery Gromov, a Moscow mathematician, suggested that the joint U.S.-Soviet mission might help "move aside the feelings of mistrust" on both sides. But another middle-aged Muscovite disagreed. "Everyone knows the political side of it," he grumped. "They have no need to talk about...
...Atlanta, a city that is now 55% black, with an unemployment rate of 9.3%, a large population of poor people, and a city-wide arsenal of privately owned guns that, it is estimated, would provide two weapons for every man, woman and child. A study made by a mathematician at M.I.T. showed that one out of every eleven children born in Atlanta in 1974 who stayed in the city would eventually be killed if the murder rate continued to grow as it has in the past...