Word: mathematician
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...composed mostly of physicists. All are devoted to "pure" rather than practical research-so pure that the physicists do not even have laboratories. One of the few bitter faculty clashes in the Institute's history was a fight over whether to retain the engineers brought in by Hungarian Mathematician John von Neumann to build a huge digital computer he had designed. The professors not only voted out the "hardware" men-but the computer as well. Less painfully, Oppenheimer in 1950 quietly phased out a school of economists who turned out to be more interested in advising Government and industry...
Unlike the pure mathematician, the applied mathematician is interested in the subject as a tool for finding useful results, not as a body of theory valued for its own sake and divorced from the outside world. Often a good part of the problem consists of translating from the language of the layman to the language of mathematics. For this reason, it is particularly important to have a good knowledge of the field to which you will be applying mathematics...
Distinct from engineers, who are concerned with design and construction, the applied mathematician generally confines himself to the mathematics of the problem, hopefully coming up with answers which are implicit in the engineer's end product...
...Leibniz was doubtless the last man who knew everything," mourns Amherst Philosophy Professor Joseph Epstein. The death in 1716 of that encyclopedic German mathematician-philosopher symbolizes the time when the knowledge explosion began forcing universities to abandon the ambition of teaching every student everything, and made them narrow down to what be came the "required courses" of modern schools. Now, all over the U.S., colleges and universities are scrutinizing the value of these lock-step requirements and, to a surprising degree, are dumping them in favor of letting students form their own education patterns...
Although he is now 36, and a mathematician for Sylvania, Paul Cooper has never lost his boyhood enthusiasm for the fanciful science-fiction stories of Jules Verne. While musing about Journey to the Center of the Earth several months ago, Cooper himself took off on a mathematical flight of fancy that more than rivals Verne's most imaginative work. By crisscrossing the earth with subterranean tunnels, the freewheeling mathematician proposes in the current issue of the American Journal of Physics, man could achieve intercontinental travel at ballistic missile speed...