Word: mathematicians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mania for Numbers. The origin of such mechanical music is much older than Orwell. The German mathematician Baron Gottfried von Leibniz (1646-1716) observed that "composers are simply men with a mania for numbers." Others have also noted the persistent relationship between music and math-between pure science and pure art. Barbaud himself began speculating on the musical potential of computers after reading that Haydn leaned heavily on the laws of probability and sometimes rolled dice to make a choice among possible chord and key combinations. Every type of music, Barbaud decided, must have its own laws, all equally rigid...
...Princeton astronomer-mathematician, Lovett scoured the world's great universities to get ideas for infant Rice. He brought in such scholars as Julian Huxley, made sure that his first 77 freshmen ("these torchbearers of the sun dawn") meant business. When only 39 students stayed the route to graduation, Rice was permanently stamped as the toughest school in Texas...
...great advantage of the hyperbolic paraboloid is that, because of a rather devious characteristic of the surface, a carpenter building the form does not have to bend his wood. "I am not a mathematician," Mr. Candela asserts, "and this is difficult to explain." Perhaps the easiest way to understand the principle is to remember that at any point on a saddle a straight line may be drawn which does not leave the surface, as it would, for example, with a sphere. And where the geometrician can draw straight lines, the carpenter can nail planks...
Along with dollars came scholars: Stanford is raiding blue-chip faculties all over the East. This fall it is taking on Yale's entire 40-year-old Center of Alcohol Studies. It captured American Historian David Potter after 19 years at Yale, Mathematician Edward G. Begle after 19 years at Yale, German Historian Gordon Craig after 20 years at Princeton, Novelist-Critic Albert J. Guerard (Stanford '34) after 23 years at Harvard. Among this fall's other acquisitions: Albert H. Hastorf, chairman of Dartmouth's psychology department; Emile Despres, chairman of Williams' economics department...
Begle's group admired the exciting experiments of Mathematician Max Beberman at the University of Illinois (TIME, July 25, 1960)-superb classroom artistry that lures children into discovering math concepts for themselves. But to make every teacher into a Beberman was clearly impossible. Begle aimed to write courses that most teachers could handle with only an hour a week of extra study...