Word: primed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Ironically, Washington's biggest problem right now may be Yeltsin himself. Despite public denials, Primakov seems to want Yeltsin's job--an ambition that has resulted in a quick pink slip for previous Prime Ministers. And while American policy-makers may find it frustrating to deal with Primakov, they are terrified of the alternatives...
...OCCUPATION: tall German supermodel BEST PUNCH: Used recently rehabbed Moss as the prime example of a group of models who don't take their jobs seriously enough and seem to spend more energy on partying than posing...
...understand how mathematics was perceived at the time. After many centuries of being a typically sloppy human mishmash in which vague intuitions and precise logic coexisted on equal terms, mathematics at the end of the 19th century was finally being shaped up. So-called formal systems were devised (the prime example being Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica) in which theorems, following strict rules of inference, sprout from axioms like limbs from a tree. This process of theorem sprouting had to start somewhere, and that is where the axioms came in: they were the primordial seeds, the Ur-theorems from...
...symbols used to write math books happen--by some amazing coincidence--to look like our numerals 0 through 9. Thus when Martians discuss in their textbooks a certain famous discovery that we on Earth attribute to Euclid and that we would express as follows: "There are infinitely many prime numbers," what they write down turns out to look like this: "84453298445087 87863070005766619463864545067111." To us it looks like one big 46-digit number. To Martians, however, it is not a number at all but a statement; indeed, to them it declares the infinitude of primes as transparently as that...
Godel, in thinking very carefully about this rather surreal scenario, soon realized that the property of being M.P. was not all that different from such familiar notions as "prime number," "odd number" and so forth. Thus earthbound number theorists could, with their standard tools, tackle such questions as, "Which numbers are M.P. numbers, and which are not?" for example, or "Are there infinitely many non-M.P. numbers?" Advanced math textbooks--on Earth, and in principle on Mars as well--might have whole chapters about M.P. numbers...