Word: mathematician
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mathematicians who gathered in a Cambridge University lecture room last Monday had no idea that they were about to witness history. They had come to hear Andrew Wiles, an English colleague based at Princeton University, give three one-hour lectures on "Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves and Galois Representations," an abstract topic even by the rarefied standards of higher math. By the end of the first hour, though, they knew something was up. Recalls Nigel Boston, a visiting mathematician at Cambridge's Isaac Newton Institute: "We realized where he could be heading. People were giving each other wide-eyed looks...
...remained a political talisman for the gay community was clear last week when several leaders refused to give it up. The San Francisco-based magazine 10 Percent, a national quarterly devoted to gay culture, made clear it had no intention of changing its name. "I'm not a mathematician," says editor Hank Donat, "but by their reasoning, there are about 2.5 million gay men in America. I guess we're all living in California...
...culture and street-level anarchy." Jude Milhon, a cyberpunk journalist who writes under the byline St. Jude, defines it as "the place where the worlds of science and art overlap, the intersection of the future and now." What cyberpunk is about, says Rudy Rucker, a San Jose State University mathematician who writes science-fiction books on the side, is nothing less than "the fusion of humans and machines...
...There are two kinds of geniuses," the eminent mathematician Mark Kac once remarked. "An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better." The other kind Kac called magicians. "Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark . . . Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber...
Take Mikhail from St. Petersburg. A 42-year-old mathematician who taught in a high-level university for 18 years, he has been forced for the past year to sing for pennies on Jerusalem's pedestrian mall. Store-keepers shoo him away, passersby laugh at him. He cannot stand the shame of making a fool of himself before fellow Jews...