Word: mathematician
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...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...
What’s in a name?A quick internet search tells me that mine might refer to anything from Scottish nobility to an Australian Olympian to a small town in Iowa. In pop culture, I’ve been everything from a mathematician to a dysfunctional kid genius to a dead child psychologist.But after nearly two decades, my name—unique spelling and all—is something that has become a part of who I am. A name isn’t something that should be changed on a whim or disregarded, and it?...
...year is 1828, and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss has just met explorer and natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt in Berlin. This is where Kehlmann begins the life stories of the two eminent German scientists, but what happens after that is as much comedy as biography. Kehlmann writes the men as comically eccentric, sometimes tyrannical and, yet, not wholly unlikable. While Humboldt travels the world, Gauss prefers to journey into the depths of mathematics. Gauss loves women and Humboldt is curiously asexual. But the two contemporaries are united by their fanatical quest to explore the secrets of the universe. Gauss even...
...Americans not to look to the state for either rights or responsibilities but to look to themselves for their strength, and then made his case with numbers. He took on Marxism and with potent logic proved that it did not work. He was perhaps the most impressive combination of mathematician, economist and caped crusader there has ever been...
This is a Pynchon novel, so of course they can. In Göttingen, Kit will be dazzled by Yashmeen Halfcourt, a beautiful mathematician with mystical leanings. Yashmeen, meanwhile, is caught up in the theoretical wars between vector analysts and the champions of Quaternions, each with their visions of which was more real--time or space. This last controversy is somehow central to Pynchon's preoccupations with time travel, alternate realities and a whole spectrum of options for escaping a world headed into the calamities of World War I and beyond. Lacking a degree in advanced math, I'm still hard...