Word: reasoner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...reason we all have such great friends, the reason I sometimes think my life is a bit like the movies, is because Harvard is the best university in the country. Certainly, Harvard has its problems, some of which are quite serious. But on balance, the Harvard experience deserves at least 99 percent of its renown. We were all lured here by the Harvard reputation, which turned out--at least in my personal experience--to be underrated...
...Iraqis have been unexpectedly quiet, reports TIME Pentagon correspondent Mark Thompson. "U.S. planes still go out on missions every day to patrol the Iraqi no-fly zones," he says, "but since March 19 the Iraqis have not done anything to challenge the aircraft or violate those zones." The reason, reports TIME U.N. correspondent William Dowell, is that the Iraqis have succeeded in accomplishing some of their immediate goals and they can enjoy the respite provided by the Kosovo mission. The last crisis with Saddam led to the expulsion of U.N. observers, he says, "and now the U.S. and its allies...
...keep people fully employed, governments have to run deficits when the economy is slowing. That's because the private sector won't invest enough. As their markets become saturated, businesses reduce their investments, setting in motion a dangerous cycle: less investment, fewer jobs, less consumption and even less reason for business to invest. The economy may reach perfect balance, but at a cost of high unemployment and social misery. Better for governments to avoid the pain in the first place by taking up the slack...
Kurt Godel was born in 1906 in Brunn, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part of the Czech Republic, to a father who owned a textile factory and had a fondness for logic and reason and a mother who believed in starting her son's education early. By age 10, Godel was studying math, religion and several languages. By 25 he had produced what many consider the most important result of 20th century mathematics: his famous "incompleteness theorem." Godel's astonishing and disorienting discovery, published in 1931, proved that nearly a century of effort by the world...
...Alan Turing had done was 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...