Word: mathematician
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Longitude, Sobel's previous nonfiction narrative, was a concise and intellectually tense retelling of the beginning of modern navigation. It was also one of the surprise publishing successes of 1995. Her new book adds a little-known personal dimension to the life of Galileo Galilei, the 17th century Pisan mathematician and astronomer who was tried, convicted and humbled for challenging church dogma that placed the earth at the center of the universe...
...1970s, when access to computers was limited and expensive, Michael Hart's pals at the University of Illinois computer lab gave him what amounted to $100 million worth of free computer time. Hart, son of a Shakespeare professor and a mathematician, decided to harness the new technology to humanistic ends by posting a copy of the Declaration of Independence that anyone with a computer and a modem could read for free...
...name pays homage to the black mathematician and surveyor who helped design Washington, D.C. in 1790. The founding group of parents and educators grew out of the DuBois Institute, a Saturday program that tried to give black children a chance for academic and personal enrichment...
...author, an Oxford mathematician called Charles Dodgson who wrote for children under the pen name Lewis Carroll, knew well that one thousand and two is just as arbitrary a number as one thousand. It is only our use of the decimal system that makes us prefer one number to the other. It is this same passion for multiples of ten that will lead to so few people going to bed early on December 31, despite the purely conventional nature of the calendar and the fact that, as we have been told ad nauseam, there was no year zero and therefore...
There is a doomsday feel to such a figure, especially with the millennium approaching. Statisticians are already drooling over all those zeroes, and the frantic calculations that have ensued are a mathematician's dream. Bullet points on all the major news websites show the results of their labor: did you know that it took all of time for the world population to hit one billion in 1804, but only twelve years for it to jump from five billion to six billion? Did you know that one tenth of all the people who have ever lived are alive today...