Word: mathematicians
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...puny human brains aren't particularly up to the task. Go back thousands of years and think about the simpler times of human existence. "We had a few friends; we had to be scared of a few animals. A trillion didn't come up very often," says Temple University mathematician John Allen Paulos, whose book Innumeracy addresses the topic. "There is a sense that when numbers are too big or too small, the brain just shuts off," says Colin Camerer, a professor of behavioral economics at the California Institute of Technology. "People either don't think about...
Veganism is an extreme form of vegetarianism, and though the term was coined in 1944, the concept of flesh-avoidance can be traced back to ancient Indian and eastern Mediterranean societies. Vegetarianism is first mentioned by the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras of Samos around 500 BCE. In addition to his theorem about right triangles, Pythagoras promoted benevolence among all species, including humans. Followers of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism also advocated vegetarianism, believing that humans should not inflict pain on other animals...
...their feats: slowing the speed of light (optical physicist Lene Hau, 2001), mapping the human genome (geneticist Eric Lander, 1987), penning acclaimed novels (Cormac McCarthy, 1981; the recently deceased David Foster Wallace, 1997), scheming to save our threatened fisheries (lobsterman Ted Ames, 2005) and solving Fermat's Last Theorem (mathematician Andrew Wiles, 1997). Seven have nabbed the Nobel Prize, including geneticist Barbara McClintock (1981) and former U.S. poet laureate Joseph Brodsky (1981). Others have won Pulitzers, Fields Medals -the math world's top honor - and National Book Awards. The chosen few are informed by an "out-of-the-blue" phone...
...Secondly, there's India's fitful, parallel struggle as a nation. As a mathematician, Suri is fond of symmetries, and India's political tumult - from bloody partition through to the difficult years of Indira Gandhi's Emergency - backdrops Meera's narrative in sometimes contrived, sometimes clever ways...
...voracious consumer of puzzles and a brilliant mathematician, University of California professor David Gale was so passionate about math that he dreamed of creating an interactive museum dedicated to the subject. But he is best known for the matching algorithm he created with colleague Lloyd Shapley that was first applied to romantic pairs: an elegant method to determine couples in which both partners prefer each other to other members of a group. Among several applications, the algorithm has since been used to match students to high schools and helped establish the protocol still used to assign new doctors to hospital...