Word: mathematician
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...insights that are forever inaccessible to computers. The reason is that all digital computers operate according to algorithms, or sets of rules that prescribe how to solve problems. Yet there are problems that cannot be approached by any system of rules, a fact shown in the 1930s by the mathematician Kurt Godel. Godel's theorem establishes that in any mathematical system there must be certain propositions that are obviously true but that can never be proved within the rules of the system...
...linchpin of Spence's plan was the relaxation of the rigid system by which departments had previously been alloted tenured posts, a system known for the Harvard mathematician who developed it in the 1950s...
...Mathematician Thomas Donaldson, 46, of Sunnyvale, Calif., believes that science will eventually make immortality possible, and he wants in on it. Last week he asked a state court judge to permit a seven-person team to freeze him, then sever his frozen head and store it. Someday, he figures, science will provide a cure for the cancer that afflicts him. Then, if doctors can master the art of brain transplantation, Donaldson's noggin could be thawed out and his brain implanted in another body. At $35,000, freezing a head is a good deal cheaper than...
History proceeds in gossip and fractals. Fractals are the mysterious and apparently irrational forms proposed by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who says that reality has shapes undreamed of by Euclid and surprises that ridicule the idea of order. The shape of a mountain is not a cone. Clouds, coastlines, tree branches, commodity prices, word frequencies, turbulence in fluids, stars in the sky, reputations, fame, the passage of history itself (think about the past ten months) -- all these are fractal shapes...
...theoretical-physics division at Los Alamos during World War II, Teller's design began to fall apart shortly after Truman launched his H-bomb program. Teller's idea had been to use the heat of a conventional A-bomb to ignite a separate H-bomb. But Ulam, a brilliant mathematician, made a series of calculations that showed that the amount of tritium fuel required for Teller's bomb was prohibitive and that even when sparked by an A-bomb, it would probably not achieve fusion...