Word: mathematician
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...Soviet mathematician Joseph Bernstein should have gone a long way in his homeland. He is, in the words of one Harvard math professor, "regarded as one of the world leaders in the many fields he works...
...first is the welfare of his family. His wife is also a mathematician, but she is seven years younger and would have faced much keener discrimination. Now she will be able to continue as a graduate student at M.I.T. His daughter is 11 years-old, and Bernstein states firmly, "I want some future...
...Blaise Pascal made an automatic device that could add or subtract with the turning of little wheels. But the clerks who spent their lives doing calculations in those days viewed Pascal's gadget as a job threat, and it never caught on. A short time later, the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz added the power of multiplication and division. Said he: "It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculations...
...such mechanical contrivances were no more than calculators. They could only do arithmetic, and very clumsily at that. The first man to conceptualize a true computer, one that would be able to do math and much more, was an irascible 19th century English mathematician named Charles Babbage. Incensed by the inaccuracies he found in the mathematical tables of his time, the ingenious Babbage (father of the speedometer, the cowcatcher for locomotives and the first reliable life-expectancy tables) turned his fertile brain to creating an automaton that could rapidly and accurately calculate long lists of functions like logarithms. The result...
...series of seminars to expose faculty members to new uses of computers for tasks that could include choreographing dance or analyzing historical evidence. Davidson College in North Carolina will organize two summer institutes for liberal arts faculty members. They will be taught by scientifically oriented professors, among them a mathematician who uses his techniques to consider social values, such as conservation, as well as costs in solving problems...