Word: mathematician
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Logo's immediate result is it establishes a good first impression," says Seymour Papert, 59, the gray-bearded, South African-born M.I.T. mathematician whose theoretical work in the arcane field of artificial intelligence led to Logo. "It convinces the child that he can master the machine. It lets him say, 'I'm the boss.' " Says Dr. Sylvia Weir, a pediatrician who works with the Educational Computing Group at M.I.T: "People have usually considered the stupid thing in the classroom the child. Now the stupid thing, as it were, is the computer. And the child...
...Yosif Begun, a Soviet Jewish mathematician, applied to emigrate to Israel. Although he had worked in the field for 20 consecutive years, he was forced to resign his position at the ministry of communications. Despite his qualifications and the demand for people with his level of training--roughly the equivalent of a master's degree--none of the other institutions in his field would hire him. Nor could he find any other kind of employment with the state. He was warned by the K.G.B. that Soviet citizens have an obligation to work, and that if he failed to find...
...most popular of these computer tongues is BASIC (for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). Developed at Dartmouth by Mathematician John Kemeny and his colleague Thomas Kurtz to let even the least mathematically gifted student converse with the university's computers, it is "understood" by virtually all of today's personal computers. To show just how easy the language is, Kemeny offers this extremely simple lesson in programming: tell the computer to find the square roots (i.e., the numbers that when multiplied by themselves, yield the original numbers) of eleven successive values, say 20 through...
...instruct very young children, even Kemeny's BASIC is much too mathematical. Instead, more and more schools are turning to an innovative computer language called LOGO (from the Greek word for reason), developed by Seymour Papert and his colleagues at M.I.T. A mathematician who studied with the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, Papert has become something of a guru of the computer generation, predicting that the machines will revolutionize learning by taking much of the mystery out of mathematics, science and technology. Says he: "The computer can make the most abstract things concrete...
...into the alien waters he had hoped for, but he remains brilliantly entertaining on his home turf. In particular, his characters are dazzling. Valeria Raresh, Corde's mother-in-law, for whom the Corders have traveled to Rumania (Bellow, incidentally, also went to Bucharest several years ago with his mathematician wife on a similar journey) lies in a state hospital, her face criss-crossed with tapes and tubes. After a coronary and a stroke, it is only a matter of time for Valeria. But in Corde's reminiscences of her. She is a strikingly vital character. "Great Valeria," the psychiatrist...