Word: mathematician
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...baffled awe. James R. Newman, 49, a Washington lawyer with a lively interest in tennis, chess and atomic energy and an academic background including graduate work in mathematics at Columbia University, is not one of these. He is fascinated by numbers. "I don't consider myself a mathematician," he says, "at least not an original, creative mathematician." But few professionals would quibble with Lawyer Newman's credentials as a gifted interpreter in their little-traveled land...
...Johns Hopkins, it was the end of a long search. After President Detlev Bronk quit in 1953 to head the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, kindly Mathematician Lowell Reed came out of retirement at 67 to serve only until the university could find a younger man. Besides its prestige, Johns Hopkins had a special attraction for Dwight Eisenhower's brother: Baltimore is only a 45-minute train ride from Washington. "I shall come," said Milton Eisenhower to his new trustees, "with enthusiasm...
...more he observed the goings-on in the Illinois high-school math class, the more uncomfortable the young mathematician became. At one point the teacher took up a "story" problem which involved two equations with two unknowns (10x+50y =320 and x+2=y). One boy ingeniously found a way to solve the problem with only one unknown, x+5 (x+2) = 32. But the teacher did not congratulate him: she told him he was "wrong" and sent him back to his seat. To Mathematician David Page, 31, of the University of Illinois' College of Education, this...
...University of Illinois has had a team working on a way to change all that. The project was launched when university authorities found engineering applicants were consistently ill-equipped mathematically, wasted months in learning basic math skills they should have learned in high school. It assigned young (then 26) Mathematician Max Beberman of the University's College of Education to show the high schools how to step up their math instruction. Beberman, later joined by Page, decided the trouble lay in the whole approach to math teaching. He junked old methods, drew up a new curriculum, now has five...
...John? As Beberman and Page see it, high-school math has sunk to its present state because students learn their theorems and formulas for an array of algebra problems ("If John is twice as old as Jane was four years ago . . ."), but never find out what makes the mathematician's brain work. In the hope of making arithmetic lively, some teachers insist on making each problem functional, as if there were nothing more to the subject than how to add up a grocery bill or compute compound interest. Such teachers completely misunderstand the adolescent, says Beberman. "The adolescent...