Word: mathematicians
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...After the Soviet atomic explosion and the subsequent Washington decision to press for an H-bomb, calculations based on the theories of Teller and others were set up on a machine called ENIAC. But there was fear that this electric brain would be too slow. Stan Ulam, a mathematician, with one helper, "undertook to execute the same job by straightforward hand computation. The next few months saw an amazing competition between the tortoise and the (electronic) hare." Ulam's "results were available even before the lengthy instructions to the machines had been completed . . . In a real emergency the mathematician...
...little (pop. 12,600) Italian town of Borgo San Sepolcro, lying in the fertile valley of the upper Tiber, has a proud boast: one of its townsmen was the great Renaissance painter and mathematician, Piero della Francesca (circa 1418-92). Legend has it that Piero was a fatherless boy who took the name of his mother Francesca. He studied at Florence, returned to Borgo San Sepolcro to get his first major commission, traveled through Italy painting in Rimini, Ferrara, Rome, Arezzo and Urbino, then settled down to spend his last 14 years in his native town compiling two mathematical treatises...
...benefit of three entranced little girls, the man who became immortal as Lewis Carroll wrote these lines for his brother and sister (aged seven and five) at a rectory at Croft. During the years that followed, as he grew up to become a clergyman, a teacher and a mathematician, the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson kept his alter ego, Carroll, well hidden from disapproving adult eyes. Carroll the storyteller preferred to save his voice for only the very young. In this slim volume, readers will have a chance to judge Lewis Carroll's earliest efforts to please his young listeners...
Albert Einstein, physicist, mathematician, cosmologist and grandfather of atomic energy, deplores the security system that the U.S. Government has established to cope with the atomic age. Last week, in a letter to the Reporter magazine, Professor Einstein wrote: "If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances...
...first two states to report-Delaware and Connecticut-showed a heavier Democratic vote than was true of the national scene. Explains Collingwood, defensively: "After all, Univac is only human-that is, it can only make predictions based on the material that humans feed into it." Collingwood asked an attendant mathematician if he could explain what went wrong, and got the Einsteinian answer: "It may be in the taxability of the K factor...