Word: maths
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...least that was the idea. Tinkering with heat-transfer equations, Williams tried to determine how much energy it would take to yield a block of ice. "It had been a while since I'd done real math problems. I had to break out the old textbook," says Williams, a product-development consultant with his own firm, Dissigno, in San Francisco. After eons of number crunching, he hit on the right formula and built a prototype. It isn't very efficient; his device uses 35 times as much energy as an electric fridge to make...
...hinterland, where the schools reduced the curriculum to communist rote. Before he left, his father told him that no matter what the risk, "you need to learn." So, after 16 hours in the field each day, Dong stole away at night with a kerosene lamp to pore over two math and physics books his father had salvaged for him. Eventually the authorities caught on to Dong's reading, but since he disguised his books to resemble Mao's Little Red Book, they praised his party fervor. That reputation gave him the rare chance to attend college, leave the fields...
...surprise that Erik Demaine counts juggling among his hobbies. The 24-year-old--a home-schooled child prodigy who became M.I.T.'s youngest professor ever at age 20--picks off one arcane math problem after another. "I work on anything I consider fun," he says. "I'm a geek." Demaine, who has already co-written more than 100 papers, specializes in the computational theory of folded structures, most notably the mathematics underlying origami...
...America's most embattled corporations has found an ally in one of America's most embattled demographics. No longer content to let its profits do the talking, Wal-Mart is trying to remake its image, in some measure with the aid of inner-city African Americans. The math is simple: Wal-Mart offers stores and jobs to poor black communities that are hemorrhaging both. Meanwhile, those communities extol the virtues of Wal-Mart, offering a buffer against the company's critics. Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott is well aware of what a business partner like Garner does for the company...
...retrofuturistic movie in which all the acting was done on an empty soundstage, then all the scenery added by computer; and her new film, Proof, about a woman whose life is almost the direct opposite of Paltrow's. She plays Catherine, whose years of caring for her mentally ill, math-genius father (Anthony Hopkins) have left her bitter, maybe nutso. After her father dies, she falls for a winsome former student of his (Jake Gyllenhaal) and gives him a brilliant mathematical proof that no one believes she has written...