Word: mathematician
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...author has a bigger target in mind than literary devices. Both Mallabar and John Clearwater, Hope's mathematician husband, are scientists who become so obsessed with their theories that they lose their grip on real life. Hope, whose previous job had been classifying 147 ancient hedgerows in south Dorset, falls in love with John's billowing dreams: "What I want to do," he says, "is write the geometry of a wave...
Five Harvard scientists--including a mathematician, a physicist and a professor of pediatrics--will be among 20 recipients of this year's National Medal of Science awards, one of the nation's top science honors...
...Harvard scholars--a mathematician who emigrated from the Soviet Union and a scientist credited with discovering the "Great Wall" in space--last weekend nabbed prestigious MacArthur Awards, one of academia's most coveted prizes...
...insights that are forever inaccessible to computers. The reason is that all digital computers operate according to algorithms, or sets of rules that prescribe how to solve problems. Yet there are problems that cannot be approached by any system of rules, a fact shown in the 1930s by the mathematician Kurt Godel. Godel's theorem establishes that in any mathematical system there must be certain propositions that are obviously true but that can never be proved within the rules of the system...
...Mathematician Alan Turing made a related discovery in the 1950s when he used his Turing machine -- an imaginary, simple computer -- to prove that there are some mathematical problems that are solvable but that cannot be solved even in principle by a digital computer. Says Penrose: "The very fact that the mind leads us to truths that are not computable convinces me that a computer can never duplicate the mind" -- this despite the fact that the human brain is often described as a particularly complex computer...