Word: mathematician
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...brought uncommon intellectual resources. In the mid-1970s he was best known as a spokesman for Soviet dissidents, especially Jews seeking to emigrate to Israel. But Anatoli Shcharansky (he later adopted his great-grandfather's Hebrew first name and simplified the English spelling of his surname) was also a mathematician, a computer scientist and a chess whiz who had devised a computer program for playing the end game. When he was arrested in 1977, he sought to use the same logic to defeat his KGB opponents, who were preparing to try him as an anti-Soviet agitator...
...good fortune, and the patience to leave this jail and to reach the land of Israel in an honest and worthy way." His wife Avital, who indefatigably campaigned around the globe for his release, symbolized for him the one "fixed point" he could absolutely rely upon. Like another mathematician before him, Archimedes, he reckoned that with a place to stand on he could move the earth. And so he did. His early release in 1986 as a result of international pressure and his triumphant arrival in Israel were understood by millions as just such a feat...
About 350 years ago, a French amateur mathematician named Pierre de Fermat scratched a devilishly tricky problem in the margin of a Greek mathematical text. Then he added, "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof ((of the theorem)), which this margin is too small to contain." Did he really have the answer? The attempts of generations of scientists to find out have made Fermat's Last Theorem the El Dorado of math problems. Now, at long last, an assistant professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University seems to have broken the code. Last month at Bonn's Max Planck Institute, Yoichi Miyaoka...
...singularities, because all scientific laws break down at these points. Most physicists believed that in the real universe the object at the heart of a black hole would be small (but not dimensionless) and extremely dense (but not infinitely so). Enter Hawking. While still a graduate student, he and Mathematician Roger Penrose developed new techniques proving mathematically that if general relativity is correct down to the smallest scale, singularities must exist. Hawking went on to demonstrate -- again, if general relativity is correct -- that the entire universe must have sprung from a singularity. As he wrote in his 1966 Ph.D. thesis...
Organizers said the conference, funded by a $35,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), will aim to apply to contemporary intellectual debate the wide-ranging thought of chemist, philosopher and mathematician Charles S. Peirce...