Word: mathematician
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...brought uncommon intellectual resources. In the mid-1970s he was best known as a spokesman for Soviet dissidents, especially Jews seeking to emigrate to Israel. But Anatoli Shcharansky (he later adopted his great-grandfather's Hebrew first name and simplified the English spelling of his surname) was also a mathematician, a computer scientist and a chess whiz who had devised a computer program for playing the end game. When he was arrested in 1977, he sought to use the same logic to defeat his KGB opponents, who were preparing to try him as an anti-Soviet agitator...
About 350 years ago, a French amateur mathematician named Pierre de Fermat scratched a devilishly tricky problem in the margin of a Greek mathematical text. Then he added, "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof ((of the theorem)), which this margin is too small to contain." Did he really have the answer? The attempts of generations of scientists to find out have made Fermat's Last Theorem the El Dorado of math problems. Now, at long last, an assistant professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University seems to have broken the code. Last month at Bonn's Max Planck Institute, Yoichi Miyaoka...
...singularities, because all scientific laws break down at these points. Most physicists believed that in the real universe the object at the heart of a black hole would be small (but not dimensionless) and extremely dense (but not infinitely so). Enter Hawking. While still a graduate student, he and Mathematician Roger Penrose developed new techniques proving mathematically that if general relativity is correct down to the smallest scale, singularities must exist. Hawking went on to demonstrate -- again, if general relativity is correct -- that the entire universe must have sprung from a singularity. As he wrote in his 1966 Ph.D. thesis...
Organizers said the conference, funded by a $35,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), will aim to apply to contemporary intellectual debate the wide-ranging thought of chemist, philosopher and mathematician Charles S. Peirce...
...When Mathematician Naum Meiman's wife was allowed to leave the Soviet Union to undergo cancer treatment last January, he thought it was a sign that his twelve years as a Jewish refusenik were about to end. But his wife died in Washington a few weeks later, and since then Meiman, 76, a founder of the Soviet human-rights movement, has remained, isolated and in need of surgery he cannot get in the Soviet Union. Soviet authorities point to his once classified work for the Soviet Academy of Sciences 30 years ago as an excuse to prevent him from joining...