Word: mathematician
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...finding success during some of his life’s most important and difficult events, including his discovery of the theory of relativity—explaining in part that “gravity is simply the curving of space”—and his tumultuous marriage to mathematician Mileva Maric in 1903. Unable to convince Maric to agree to a divorce, Einstein made a bet with his wife. According to Isaacson, if and when he won his first Nobel Prize, he would give the prize money to Maric in exchange for the desired split. Unfortunately for Einstein, Isaacson...
...sister and I all read. It was a very odd book, a rattlebag of art, mathematics, music, philosophy, symbolic logic, computers, genetics, paradoxes, palindromes and Zen koans among many, many other things. Most of it went way over my head--my precocious older sister, who later became a mathematician, and even later a sculptor, was the real target audience--but it was playfully written and deeply weird and off-the-charts smart and generally just the thing for a household of pretentious, alienated adolescents to chew on. My siblings and I weren't especially close, but we always had that...
...book was called Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid--Gdel being the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gdel; Escher, the fantastical Dutch artist M.C. Escher; and Bach, the Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach. The extraordinary mind that braided these three figures together in one book belonged to one Douglas Hofstadter, a physics Ph.D. who was only 34 years old at the time. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for Gdel, Escher, Bach, and it went on to become a cult classic that influenced a generation of thinkers. Since then Hofstadter has published on numerous subjects...
...Past winners of the prize include Freeman J. Dyson, physicist and mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Charles H. Townes, UCLA professor and Nobel laureate for physics. The 2006 winner was cosmologist John D. Barrow, who has written in depth on the connection between life and the universe and what scientists may not understand about matter, space and time. Judges of the prize, awarded by the John Templeton Foundation, include leaders from the fields of science and religion...
...Data just because he doesn't have the soft tissue of a human brain. Identifying it with information processing would go too far in the other direction and grant a simple consciousness to thermostats and calculators--a leap that most people find hard to stomach. Some mavericks, like the mathematician Roger Penrose, suggest the answer might someday be found in quantum mechanics. But to my ear, this amounts to the feeling that quantum mechanics sure is weird, and consciousness sure is weird, so maybe quantum mechanics can explain consciousness...