Word: mathematicians
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Pairing came naturally to Dorry Segev, a transplant surgeon, and his wife Sommer Gentry, a mathematician. After meeting in 1999 at a swing-dance competition in Stamford, Conn., the couple became dance partners and went on to win British lindy-hop competitions before getting hitched in 2003. Last year the duo partnered to devise a system that could save hundreds of lives a year by more efficiently matching kidney donors with the 62,000-plus Americans waiting for a transplant...
...number of organs actually donated is less than the number being offered. "The matching programs that exist are not efficient," says Segev, whose optimized matching system, developed with Gentry, was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in April. Based on an algorithm created by the Canadian mathematician Jack Edmonds in 1965, the system improves paired donation by ensuring the maximum number of matches while still factoring in age, location and willingness to travel. Segev estimates that if only 7% of kidney-transplant hopefuls participated in a national program, the health-care system would save $750 million annually...
Other arguments in this new brand of anti-Darwinism focus on missing pieces in the fossil record, particularly the Cambrian period, when there was an explosion of novel species. Still other advocates, including mathematician, philosopher and theologian William Dembski, who is heading up a new center for intelligent design at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, use the mathematics of probability to try to show that chance mutations and natural selection cannot account for nature's complexity. In contrast to earlier opponents to Darwin, many proponents of intelligent design accept some role for evolution--heresy to some creationists. They are also careful...
...nine-by-nine-square grid, broken into three-by-three-square cells. The object: fill each square with a number from 1 to 9 so that every number appears only once in each row, column and cell. Long popular in Japan, sudoku is based on 18th century mathematician Leonhard Euler's Latin Square, and first appeared in U.S. puzzle books in the 1970s under the scintillating title Number Puzzle. The Western craze didn't take off until last fall when an enterprising New Zealander used the Japanese name to pitch his puzzle-generating program to the London Times. Sudoku...
...brother, David Mac Lane, explained that despite his prominence, the famed mathematician was often reluctant to take on administrative posts...