Word: mathematician
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With his short, rotund figure and his spade beard, Professor Norbert Wiener of M.I.T. looked like a harmless Santa Claus. Instead he bristled with versatility. He was a top-rank mathematician who fathered a new branch of science, an enthusiastic mountain climber, and a facile writer of both fiction and philosophy. He could talk intelligently on almost any subject. When he died of a heart attack in Stockholm last week, his colleagues the world over testified to a special sense of loss. For Wiener was one of a vanishing crew-a first-rate scientist whose curiosity and skills covered...
...later program, Stefan Wolpe's First Symphony was equally iconoclastic and prefaced by an even airier speech. Wolpe had written it in 1956, had never been able to get an orchestra to tackle what Bernstein called this "unperform-able work." Finally, after Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg-a mathematician as well as a conductor-agreed to take the podium, it went into rehearsal. It was still too much for the Philharmonic, which attempted only the first two movements (Not Too Slow and Charged). The symphony rapidly disintegrated into fragments of non-melody and non-rhythm. Long passages sounded like a busy...
Each year more U.S. parents find that their children's mathematics home work is vastly different from what math was when they went to school. This is the "new math," and the change goes back to 1952, when Mathematician Max Beberman and others became alarmed that math teaching in U.S. schools had not changed essentially in 150 years. In pioneering new methods at the University of Illinois, Beberman sparked a movement that has now influenced about 10% of U.S. elementary schools and 60% of high schools. This year Texas assigned 30,000 teachers to learn new math. This month...
...squares and triangles as symbols. A teacher might ask: If the boxes contain the same number, how should ∎ + A -∎ = 6 be completed? One first-grader's immediate answer: any number for the boxes, but only 6 for the triangle. In one of his experimental classes, reports Mathematician Robert B. Davis of the Missouri-based Madison Project, one third-grade boy actually invented a new way of subtracting by junking the borrowing process in 64 minus 28. His answer: "Subtracting 8 from 4 gives minus 4. 20 from 60 is 40, and 40 plus a minus 4 equals...
Others include Mathematician Marshall Stone, son of the late Chief Justice, and Arabist Marshall Hodgson, author of The Assassins. James Redfield, son of the founder, is a classicist with a bent for cultural anthropology. Mircea Eliade is a professor of the history of religions, a Jungian psychologist, a novelist in Rumanian, and the envy of his students for being able to "drink whisky all night and never drop a line of conversation...