Word: cartesian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...many of the teachers, the course is anything but a snap. While the pupils grasp the latest teaching with ease, the teachers must first discard much of what they were taught, master such new (to them) terms as Cartesian products, null sets and strict inequalities. "In trigonometry, for instance," says Supervisor Hoel, "the emphasis used to be on surveying and navigation. Now the emphasis is on vectors, the theory of sets, probability, statistics and symbolic logic...
...existentialist intellectuals. "The problem of the aoth century is the death of man." Most of the writings of 50-year-old, Paris-dwelling Irish Expatriate Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot) are opaque obituaries of humanity. Written in a kind of Joycean code, they are further complicated by a neo-Cartesian quest for identity, the logic of which runs: "I cannot think and do not know, therefore I am-or am I?" In his play Waiting for Godot, this intellectual razzle-dazzle bewildered theatergoers, delighted highbrows and kept critics lunging desperately for underlying meanings. Malone Dies will furrow many another critical...
...weighing is done in a complicated apparatus whose essential part is a tiny glass tube closed at one end and trapping a bubble of air. When this "Cartesian diver" is properly weighted, it floats midway in a column of water, and slight changes in water pressure can make it sink or rise by compressing its bubble...
...amoeba on his scale, Dr. Prescott waits until one of his stock has just divided into two new individuals. Working with a powerful microscope, he picks one of them up with a hairlike suction tube and delicately transfers it to a minute cup on top of the Cartesian diver. It cannot escape, but it thrives slimily on a broth of smaller protozoa. By measuring the pressure that will keep the underwater Cartesian diver on the zero line, Dr. Prescott can weigh his captive amoeba at all stages of growth. When the amoeba has doubled in weight, it generally divides into...
Representing philosophy as an approach to reality, Charles L. Stevenson, visiting professor of Philosophy, attacked the Cartesian method of suspended judgment...