Word: mathematician
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Solipsism is the belief that the whole world is me, and as Mathematician Martin Gardner points out, its authentic version is not to be found outside mental institutions. What is to be found outside the asylum is its philosophic cousin, the belief that the whole world is like me. This species of solipsism-plural solipsism, if you like-is far more common because it is far less lonely. Indeed, it yields a very congenial world populated exclusively by creatures of one's own likeness, a world in which Lincoln pines for his dinner with André or, more consequentially...
...17th century brick building on Paris' Boulevard de Port-Royal, once the abbey where the Mathematician Blaise Pascal underwent religious conversion, a quite different kind of experiment is taking place. Into a small room of the Baudelocque Maternity Hospital marches a nurse bearing a tiny, wrinkled infant named Gery. He is four days old and weighs 6 lbs. 6 oz. The nurse carefully deposits Gery in a waist-high steel bassinet that stands next to a computer. The computer is attached to an empty nipple. The question to be tested: Exactly what sounds can young Gery recognize...
Herman Kahn, who died last week at his home in Chappaqua, N.Y., of a heart attack at 61, was a mathematician, physicist, economist, weapons analyst and historian. But above all he was a provocateur in the sedate world of ideas, a futurist who attempted, in his own words, "to cope with history before it happens." He was a pioneer in using scientific and mathematical tools to project the future. With his 300-lb. bulk and a florid face framed by a tailored white beard, Kahn had a commanding presence that seemed to complement a mental and verbal vigor bordering...
...American original, a cranky genius and an ingenious crank. He liked to call himself "an engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmologist, comprehensive designer and choreographer." He was also a mystical optimist who believed in the survival of mankind against whatever odds...
Einstein was no Darth Vader. How ever, Johnson argues, the belief that physical reality depended on where one stood was smuggled by social radicals into the realm of moral truth. The author's link age to the gentle mathematician is shaky, but his point is strong: moral relativism, the notion that good and evil are matters merely of point of view, is itself an evil...