Word: mathematicians
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...long history, Exxon Corp. has insisted that only company officers could serve on its board; not until 1966 did it begin choosing "outside" directors. Now it is going far outside indeed. Its latest nominee for director is Martha Peterson, 57, president of New York's Barnard College, a mathematician with a Ph.D. in educational psychology and an amateur ornithologist, who admits: "I am not a person who is terribly knowledgeable about business and Exxon." The world's largest oil company has never had a female director be fore, and Peterson suspects that she was chosen largely because "they...
...struck by a bitter paradox: prison offered the possibility of discussing freely what was unthinkable "outside." Meetings with prisoners led him, for the first time, to question his faith in Marx and Lenin. One old-time convict, a former associate of Lenin's, told him: "You're a mathematician. Don't forget Descartes. Subject everything to doubt. Everything...
According to police, the abduction began when Peter Benenson, a 31-year- old Berkeley mathematician, was way laid by as many as five attackers as he unloaded a car full of groceries at his home. Forcing Benenson to the back seat floor, three of the gang drove his car to the $250-a-month duplex apartment in Berkeley that Patricia shared with her fiance Steven Weed, 26, a graduate student in philosophy. A young white woman persuaded Weed to open the door so that she could report an auto accident; when he did, she and two black men barged...
Invented in 1970 by a Cambridge University mathematician named John Horton Conway and popularized by Mathematical Games Expert Martin Gardner in the pages of Scientific American, Life is a kind of solitaire played by one person on a checkerboard or graph paper, or indeed any gridlike field that contains adjoining squares of equal size. The playing pieces, or counters, are chips (any number) that are placed at random on squares across the board. They are then manipulated by what Conway calls his three "genetic laws"-for birth, death and survival. Under the Law of Birth, each empty square adjoined...
...prove that Archimedes could indeed have caused the Roman vessels to burst into flames. At first Sakkas figured that Archimedes might have used a large convex mirror to focus the sun's rays on the invading galleys. In fact, as early as the 6th century the mathematician and architect Anthemius of Tralles suggested that Archimedes had used a large hexagonal mirror. But Sakkas soon decided that such a large mirror was beyond the technology of Archimedes' day. Besides, he says, "we must assume that the Romans were not blind enough to sit idly by as an enormous mirror...