Word: theorems
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...theorem that "the camera cannot lie" is one banality which no self-respect-ing photographer ever repeats. Unless a camera is skilfully used it can produce mechanical lies on the negative, and in many kinds of light or shadow even expert photographers do not yet know how to reproduce what they see. Under the best technical circumstances, moreover, a photograph tells precisely that fraction of truth allowed by the camera's brief interval of exposure and limited field of vision. This fraction may be very slight or very great, depending on the photographer's luck, care and awareness...
...reduce complicated wind motions to a series of simple, understandable oscillations. Thus mathematicians hope to predict how the shape of an airplane wing will affect the motion of the wind. Next practical step would be designing of a wing for more speed, safety, lift. Application of the "ergodic" theorem has proved very useful, said Dr. Wiener, rushing into a mass of detail so abstruse that not all his colleagues could understand him. Many unsolved problems on turbulent motion still remain, but Wiener's enthusiasm for harmonic analysis was so intense last week that California Tech's famed Eric...
...last theorem of French Mathematician Pierre Fermat, laid down in the 17th Century states that there are no solutions to the equation: x n +y n = z n , n being a power greater than the square and x, y and z being whole numbers which are not zero.* Fermat wrote on the margin of a book that he had hit upon a proof of the theorem, but that there was not room enough on the margin to write it out. He died before he wrote it anywhere else that anyone knew of. The theorem became celebrated in the history...
...German-Jewish mathematician named Samuel Isaac Krieger, who was taking a mineral bath near Buffalo, N. Y., suddenly leaped out, rushed naked into the adjoining room, began to scribble figures. He thought he had discovered something too: a solution to the equation given in Fermat's last theorem...
...still there. Back came the answer: "Preis besteht noch" (Prize still stands). Krieger doubted, however, that Adolf Hitler would allow the money to leave Germany, especially since the claimant was conspicuously non-Aryan. A matter which he apparently overlooked was that the prize is offered for proof of the theorem, whereas his solution, if valid, would constitute disproof...