Word: zeta
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...double star Zeta Aurigae, said Harvard's Dr. Zdenek Kopal, consists of a smallish blue-white star waltzing through space with a huge "red giant." As he expected, the little star passed behind the big one. But its light did not dim out with proper regularity. Dr. Kopal peered long and hard at his spectro-photographs, concluded that the atmosphere of the red giant had shot out a vast "prominence," 600,000 miles wide. "Watch Zeta Aurigae," he advised the astronomers...
...sure way for any mathematician to achieve immortal fame would be to prove or disprove the Riemann hypothesis. This baffling theory, which deals with prime numbers, is usually stated in Riemann's symbolism as follows: "All the nontrivial zeros of the zeta function of s, a complex variable, lie on the line where sigma is ½-(sigma being the real part of s)." The theory was propounded in 1859 by Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (who revolutionized geometry and laid the foundations for Einstein's theory of relativity). No layman has ever been able to understand...
...observatory at Bloemfontein, South Africa, must be phrased in ordinary instead of scientific language. A censor might be difficult about such messages as: "Nova explosion Puppis shoot nightly using whole battery: 08095 13512 Urgent." This means: "Make systematic observations of bright new star in constellation Puppis near star Zeta using all telescopes...
...censors would not like a brief and effective message such as 'Nova explosion Puppis shoot nightly using whole battery' followed by positional numbers and the word 'urgent.' That sounds subversive. The equivalent 'Make systematic observations of bright new star in constellation Puppis near star Zeta using all telescopes' is satisfactory and expensive...
...revolution hit China before Mei-ling hit Wellesley, and her only excitement about it was what she caught from her sister Ching-ling (who later married Dr. Sun). At Wellesley her favorite course was Arthurian Romance. She joined Tau Zeta Epsilon, spoke a languid Southern accent, and was sometimes vivacious, sometimes somber, always neat. Professor Annie K. Tuell, with whom she lived, says: "She kept up an awful thinking about everything." She used to speak eloquently of China's contributions to civilization, and regretted Western neglect of them. But she wrote a friend: "The only thing Oriental about...