Word: proved
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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First, the institutional problems. Although the suicide rate at Harvard has remained fairly constant over the last 15 years, the temptation to accept its occurrence as inevitable is wrong. The statistics do not prove Harvard's success in preventing further suicides but rather its failure in reducing them...
...before, Goddard, a physics professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., had published an arid little paper on an outrageous topic, rocket travel. Unlike most of his colleagues, Goddard believed rocketry was a viable technology, and his paper, primly titled "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes," was designed to prove it. For the lay reader, there wasn't much in the writing to excite interest, but at the end, the buttoned-up professor unbuttoned a bit. If you used his technology to build a rocket big enough, he argued, and if you primed it with fuel that was powerful enough...
Some will say that in the longer run, Wittgenstein's legacy will prove to be the more valuable. Perhaps it will. Wittgenstein, like any other charismatic thinker, continues to attract fanatics who devote their life to disagreeing with one another (and, presumably, with my brief summary) about the ultimate meaning of his words. These disciples cling myopically to their Wittgenstein, not realizing that there are many great Wittgensteins to choose from. My hero is the one who showed us new ways of being suspicious of our own convictions when confronting the mysteries of the mind. The fact remains that...
...working, his way of interpreting the past. Born in Kenya of English missionaries, Louis was initiated by tribal elders into the native Kikuyu society. As a young man he was adventurous, impulsive, driven, ruggedly handsome and romantically African. Fresh out of Cambridge, Louis set out to prove Darwin's theory that Africa was humankind's homeland--and to discover evidence for his own belief that true man, Homo, had a very ancient origin...
...third shot was the lucky one. The eminent Cambridge don G.H. Hardy took the time to decipher the young man's idiosyncratic scrawls and realized he was corresponding with a genius. Unlike trained mathematicians, Ramanujan knew his speculations about numbers were true, so he didn't bother to prove them. That wouldn't do. Hardy brought him to England in 1914, and the pair spent four years working to prove the self-taught mathematician's intuitively brilliant conjectures. Alas, Ramanujan hated England and died of tuberculosis in 1920 at age 32--with so much of his opus left unproved that...