Word: problem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...newly formed Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., a nonprofit research institute set up by the Bamberger family with profits from their department stores. The I.A.S. proved to be the perfect intellectual playground for Von Neumann's boundless genius. He threw himself with enthusiasm into one intractable problem after another, ranging from the abstract mathematics of quantum mechanics to the practical problems of weather prediction, hydrology and the patterns of artillery fire...
...recently visited the I.A.S. archives and paged through Von Neumann's handwritten lab notebooks describing the construction and testing of his primitive computer systems. Interspersed with technical data are comments such as, "5 a.m.: I've been at this all night, and I still can't find the problem. I'm disgusted and I'm going to bed!"--a sentiment any computer programmer will recognize. Von Neumann didn't just design the stored-program computer; he was the first hacker...
...belief that flight is possible." The reality of that obsession was a lonely quest for the brothers in the workroom behind their bike shop, plotting to defy gravity and conquer the wind. Yet that obsessive kind of world-changing belief is a force that drives you to solve a problem, to find the breakthrough--a force that drives you to bet everything on a fragile wing or a new idea. It was a force that led the Wright brothers to invent, single-handedly, each of the technologies they needed to pursue their dream...
...Nobel Prize for Medicine (with Florey and Chain) in 1945. By this time, even Fleming was aware that penicillin had an Achilles' heel. He wrote in 1946 that "the administration of too small doses ... leads to the production of resistant strains of bacteria." It's a problem that plagues us to this...
Before Keynes, economists were gloomy naysayers. "Nothing can be done," "Don't interfere," "It will never work," they intoned with Eeyore-like pessimism. But Keynes was an unswerving optimist. Of course we can lick unemployment! There's no reason to put up with recessions and depressions! The "economic problem is not--if we look into the future--the permanent problem of the human race," he wrote (liberally using italics for emphasis...