Word: mathematician
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...would appear on the doorstep of fellow mathematicians without warning--a frail, disheveled, elderly man, hopped up on amphetamines and wearing a ratty raincoat--and announce, in a thick Hungarian accent, "My mind is open." For a day, or a week or a month, the man or woman who answered the knock would have to take nonstop care of this helpless guest who couldn't figure out how to cut a grapefruit or wash his underwear--and in return would be permitted the exhausting, exhilarating experience of following the thought processes of Paul Erdos, the most prolific and arguably...
...Furbies, have one thing in common: they are all "Von Neumann machines," variations on the basic computer architecture that John von Neumann, building on the work of Alan Turing, laid out in the 1940s. Men have become famous for less. But in the lifetime of this Hungarian-born mathematician who had his hand in everything from quantum physics to U.S. policy during the cold war, the Von Neumann machine was almost the least of his accomplishments...
...would balance the budget if elected. Keynes' visit to the White House two years later to urge F.D.R. to do more deficit spending wasn't exactly a blazing success. "He left a whole rigmarole of figures," a bewildered F.D.R. complained to Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. "He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist." Keynes was equally underwhelmed, telling Perkins that he had "supposed the President was more literate, economically speaking...
...Depression wore on, Roosevelt tried public works, farm subsidies and other devices to restart the economy, but he never completely gave up trying to balance the budget. In 1938 the Depression deepened. Reluctantly, F.D.R. embraced the only new idea he hadn't yet tried, that of the bewildering British "mathematician." As the President explained in a fireside chat, "We suffer primarily from a failure of consumer demand because of a lack of buying power." It was therefore up to the government to "create an economic upturn" by making "additions to the purchasing power of the nation...
...Wittgenstein's Cambridge seminar on the foundations of mathematics included a brilliant young mathematician, Alan Turing, who was giving his own course that term on the same topic. Turing too had been excited by the promise of mathematical logic and, like Wittgenstein, had come to see that it had limitations. But in the course of Turing's formal proof that the dream of turning all mathematics into logic was strictly impossible, he had invented a purely conceptual device--now known as a Universal Turing Machine--that provided the logical basis for the digital computer. And whereas Wittgenstein's dream...