Word: newman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Fissionable Personality. In the 15 years since Newman began working on the anthology with his left hand, his right hand has been busy with enough careers to fill a lifetime. During World War II he hopped between government agencies, spent a term as special assistant to Under Secretary of War Robert Patterson. In 1945 he became counsel to the Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy. With the late Senator Brien McMahon, Newman helped write the key bill that placed atomic development under civilian control. Since the war he has been a magazine editor (Scientific American, the New Republic...
...Newman's personal radioactivity occasionally sizzles through in the 1,100,000 words of his anthology. He professes surprise at finding "independence of judgment and boldness of conception" in the writing of an engineer (Frederick William Lanchester). Later he suggests that mathematicians should examine the beautiful and the good because "philosophers, theologians, writers on esthetics and other experts have been probing these matters for more than 2,000 years without making any notable advance...
...Newman's commentaries deftly introduce such diverse figures as Physicists Galileo and Newton, Economists Keynes and Malthus, Mathematicians von Neumann and Russell, Humorists Carroll (who also taught geometry) and Leacock. The subject matter is equally varied, includes Daniel Bernoulli's kinetic theory of gases, Clement Durell's discussion of Einstein's theory of relativity ("It is against common sense," says Newman of the theory, "but so at first were the ideas of vaccination and of men living upside down in the Antipodes"), a mathematical assessment of military strength by Frederick Lanchester (Newman notes that abstract theories...
Obscene Quantities. Newman feels about the 15 years he spent on his anthology as he feels about his adolescence: "I don't begrudge the time, but I wouldn't want to repeat it." Vacationing on Cape Cod last week, he attributed the thumping advance sales to guilt feelings on the part of adults about their lack of mathematical knowledge. "That's probably why they're buying my book in such obscene quantities," he speculated. "They may feel that if they can make some human contact with this terrifying subject, they'll be able to find...
Says Anthologist Newman (coauthor with Edward Kasner of Mathematics and the Imagination, a 1940 bestseller): "I'm dumbfounded at the reception the books have got. I don't write for a living. I wrote these books because I enjoyed doing it and, I suppose, because I wanted to hear myself talk-which is every author's reason for writing. The World of Mathematics is a very good book, but the fact that it's selling so well is really unrelated to the quality of the book-up to now, at least, because all that people have...