Word: mathematicians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIED. JURGEN MOSER, 71, renowned mathematician who advanced scientists' understanding of how the solar system works and aided the development of particle accelerators; of cancer; in Zurich...
Einstein continued to work on the problem in Berlin, undisturbed by domestic matters and largely unaffected by the war, until he finally found the right equations, in November 1915. Einstein had discussed his ideas with the mathematician David Hilbert during a visit to the University of Gottingen in the summer of 1915, and Hilbert independently found the same equations a few days before Einstein. Nevertheless, as Hilbert admitted, the credit for the new theory belonged to Einstein. It was his idea to relate gravity to the warping of space-time. It is a tribute to the civilized state of Germany...
...implanted itself firmly in popular culture. The trend began in 1994 when Princeton University's Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem, a cantankerous problem that had defeated the best mathematical minds for more than 350 years. Not since Archimedes ran naked from his bathtub shouting "Eureka!" has a mathematician received more publicity. PEOPLE magazine put him on its list of "the 25 most intriguing people of the year," the Gap asked him to model jeans, and Barbara Walters chased him for an interview. "Who's Barbara Walters?" asked the bookish Wiles, who had somehow gone through life without...
...filmmakers green-lighted Good Will Hunting, in which Matt Damon, who does watch TV, makes it sexy to be a number cruncher. (The sexy image was reversed--for the few bohemians who saw it--by the 1998 art-house flick [pi], the story of a psychotic, self-mutilating mathematician who discovers a very big number that holds the secrets of the universe.) Books on mathematics, such as Fermat's Enigma and A Beautiful Mind, the tale of a schizophrenic mathematical economist who wins the Nobel Prize, hit best-seller lists here and abroad. (I came to appreciate the eclectic taste...
Seife tells stories of mathematicians involved in the denial or promotion of zero that are as incredible as the plot of [pi]. We learn that Pythagoras, the father of mathematical proof, was a vegetarian who would not eat beans because they reminded him of gonads. Legend has it that when his mathematical enemies set his house ablaze and chased the fire-fleeing Pythagoras to the edge of a bean field, the great mathematician declared that he would rather die than mingle with the beans. His pursuers happily slit his throat...