Word: mathematician
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DIED. JURGEN MOSER, 71, renowned mathematician who advanced scientists' understanding of how the solar system works and aided the development of particle accelerators; of cancer; in Zurich...
...implanted itself firmly in popular culture. The trend began in 1994 when Princeton University's Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem, a cantankerous problem that had defeated the best mathematical minds for more than 350 years. Not since Archimedes ran naked from his bathtub shouting "Eureka!" has a mathematician received more publicity. PEOPLE magazine put him on its list of "the 25 most intriguing people of the year," the Gap asked him to model jeans, and Barbara Walters chased him for an interview. "Who's Barbara Walters?" asked the bookish Wiles, who had somehow gone through life without...
...filmmakers green-lighted Good Will Hunting, in which Matt Damon, who does watch TV, makes it sexy to be a number cruncher. (The sexy image was reversed--for the few bohemians who saw it--by the 1998 art-house flick [pi], the story of a psychotic, self-mutilating mathematician who discovers a very big number that holds the secrets of the universe.) Books on mathematics, such as Fermat's Enigma and A Beautiful Mind, the tale of a schizophrenic mathematical economist who wins the Nobel Prize, hit best-seller lists here and abroad. (I came to appreciate the eclectic taste...
Seife tells stories of mathematicians involved in the denial or promotion of zero that are as incredible as the plot of [pi]. We learn that Pythagoras, the father of mathematical proof, was a vegetarian who would not eat beans because they reminded him of gonads. Legend has it that when his mathematical enemies set his house ablaze and chased the fire-fleeing Pythagoras to the edge of a bean field, the great mathematician declared that he would rather die than mingle with the beans. His pursuers happily slit his throat...
Longitude, Sobel's previous nonfiction narrative, was a concise and intellectually tense retelling of the beginning of modern navigation. It was also one of the surprise publishing successes of 1995. Her new book adds a little-known personal dimension to the life of Galileo Galilei, the 17th century Pisan mathematician and astronomer who was tried, convicted and humbled for challenging church dogma that placed the earth at the center of the universe...