Word: mathematician
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...prime characteristic of the pure mathematician is an inability to speak in language that is intelligible to the layman. It follows that any novelist with a 14-year-old mathematical genius as his hero is probably looking for trouble. Ratner's Star, Author Don DeLillo's fourth book, has just such a hero-Billy Twillig-and its problems begin right there. Although Billy has won the only Nobel Prize ever awarded in his field, neither he nor DeLillo can explain much about the nature of "zorgs," Twillig's epochal discovery. Aside from his ineffable talent, Billy...
Last week Soviet Scientist Leonid I. Plyushch was finally able to tell about it. Still hesitant in speech, uncertain at times of his surroundings, the drawn, chain-smoking Ukrainian mathematician appeared at a Paris press conference to discuss both his life as a dissident in the U.S.S.R. and his three-year purgatory in Soviet prisons and mental hospitals. He had been accused of anti-Soviet activities, namely protesting the arrests and trials of other dissidents and publishing his views in samizdat (underground) publications. In what is now a classic Soviet method of punishing dissidents, Plyushch was interrogated, imprisoned and finally...
...even more astonishing feat was accomplished by Cambridge Mathematician Alan Turing. Turing was a pure eccentric, a runner who "would on occasion arrive at conferences at the Foreign Office in London having run the 40 miles from Bletchley in old flannels and a vest with an alarm clock tied with binder twine around his waist." Turing was "wild as to hair, clothes and conventions" and given to "long, disturbing silences punctuated by a cackle." But by 1939, confounding all predictions, he had designed an "Ultra" machine that could decode Enigma's messages...
About a year ago, a Harvard postgraduate student met a 17-year-old mathematician in the Soviet Union who wanted to continue his studies in the United States. They hatched a plan that may have seemed like just wishful thinking...
...mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell was a child's delight, full of games and good spirits and tall tales. As the Pied Piper of Cairn Voel, his country retreat on the Cornwall coast, he used to lead his young followers on hunts for the ingredients of a special home brew-a concoction of stagnant water, mold, dead leaves, old grass and whatever other unsavories could be dredged up at the moment...