Word: theorems
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ancel recently invented her own mathematical theorem...
That argument may temporarily assuage war-scarred Nicaraguans, who yearn for prosperity and peace. But investing a single unelected official -- even one as able as Lacayo -- with so much authority is contrary to the spirit of democracy, and calls to mind Lord Acton's theorem about the corrosive effect of absolute power...
...computers. The reason is that all digital computers operate according to algorithms, or sets of rules that prescribe how to solve problems. Yet there are problems that cannot be approached by any system of rules, a fact shown in the 1930s by the mathematician Kurt Godel. Godel's theorem establishes that in any mathematical system there must be certain propositions that are obviously true but that can never be proved within the rules of the system...
...photon puzzle was nothing more than a matter of speculation until 1964, when an Irish theoretical physicist named John Stewart Bell restated the problem as a simple mathematical proposition. A young physicist named John Clauser came upon Bell's theorem and realized that it opened the door to testing the two-photon problem in an experiment. Like Einstein, Clauser was bothered by the seemingly absurd implications of quantum mechanics. Says Clauser, now a research physicist at the University of California, Berkeley: "I had an opportunity to devise a test and see whether nature would choose quantum mechanics or reality...