Word: mathematician
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Liebert two years ago conducted "a rather through exploration" of Lang's background in preparing a book review and came away fascinated by the mathematician's brilliance and his "reputation as a gadfly and a provocateur." Liebert and others describe Lang as a fiercely determined, sincere and relentless advocate of political issues in the academic world, who forces his adversaries to address complex problems with unbroken logic...
Lang has written 27 mathematics texts, many of which pushed out the frontiers of the discipline. "They're extremely valuable contributions," says Tate, and Jonathan P.E. Hodgson, professor of mathematics at Adelphi University, adds that "it is unusual for a mathematician to have written so many high-level books in so many fields...
Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque is a sprawling research establishment best known for its work on highly secret defense projects, including nuclear weaponry. Last week Sandia exploded a different sort of bombshell. Its mathematicians announced that they had factored a 69-digit number, the largest ever to be subjected to such numerical dissection. Their triumph is more than an intellectual exercise. It could have far-flung repercussions for national security. As anyone who has ever passed through intermediate algebra knows (or once knew), factoring means breaking a number into its smallest whole-number multiplicands greater than 1. For example...
Unlike ordinary computers, the Cray can sample whole clusters of numbers simultaneously, like a sieve sifting through sand for coins. At Sandia, Simmons joined with his colleagues Mathematicians James Davis and Diane Holdridge to teach their own Cray how to factor. That involved developing an algorithm, or set of algebraic instructions, that would break the problem down into small steps. They succeeded admirably. In rapid succession they factored numbers of 58, 60, 63 and 67 digits. At this point, however, even the power of their Cray seemed to have reached its limit. But the Sandia team made one more...
...friendly man, he eats lunch at home every day and later has only a light supper, often after a swim in a university pool. He likes to exercise on weekends by tramping 20 miles through the wilderness of Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco. Despite his mathematician's passion for precision and clarity, his literary taste runs to the richly convoluted prose of Proust. As a teacher, Debreu is known for jotting mathematical formulas in the upper left-hand corner of a blackboard at the beginning of a lecture and then gradually covering every bit of remaining...