Word: proofed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...included a brilliant young mathematician, Alan Turing, who was giving his own course that term on the same topic. Turing too had been excited by the promise of mathematical logic and, like Wittgenstein, had come to see that it had limitations. But in the course of Turing's formal proof that the dream of turning all mathematics into logic was strictly impossible, he had invented a purely conceptual device--now known as a Universal Turing Machine--that provided the logical basis for the digital computer. And whereas Wittgenstein's dream of a universal ideal language for expressing all meanings...
...answer, in the negative, a vexing question in the arcane realm of mathematical logic, few nonspecialists today would have any reason to remember him. But the method Turing used to show that certain propositions in a closed logical system cannot be proved within that system--a corollary to the proof that made Kurt Godel famous--had enormous consequences in the world at large. For what this eccentric young Cambridge don did was to dream up an imaginary machine--a fairly simple typewriter-like contraption capable somehow of scanning, or reading, instructions encoded on a tape of theoretically infinite length...
...simpler, radar found its way into airplanes, boats and air-traffic-control towers, improving navigation and ensuring that even a cow-pasture airport could operate safely. By the end of the century, the same basic technology was being used to steer spacecraft, track storms and help police catch speeders--proof that even the most arcane science can pay very pedestrian dividends...
When the war ended, Mengele fled to South America. He died there in 1979 and was buried quietly under an assumed name. His remains were disinterred and identified in 1985--a too late bit of proof that even the Ubermensch can come to an ignoble...
...thing as a vast repository of historical information. Even dna will not point all the way back to the beginning of life, but it will provide clues to the self-replicating entities first assembled from simple chemicals on the primeval earth. The century ahead will see the first laboratory proof that self-replicating systems can form from ordinary chemicals. Determining whether that is how life really began will take longer...