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Sebald, W. G.

(Encyclopedia)Sebald, W. G. (Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald), 1944–2001, German novelist, grad. Freiburg Univ. (1965). Sebald's novels are dense, elegiac, and meditative. They mingle fiction with history and th...

Ceres, in Roman religion and mythology

(Encyclopedia)Ceres sîrˈēz [key], in Roman religion and mythology, goddess of grain; daughter of Saturn and Ops. She was identified by the Romans with the Greek Demeter. Her worship was connected with that of th...

Ganesa

(Encyclopedia)Ganesa gənāˈsə [key], b. 1507, d. after 1564, Indian astronomer. As a boy of 13 in a village N of Mumbai, Ganesa wrote a treatise on astronomy, the Grahalaghava, which has often been reprinted and...

lightning

(Encyclopedia)lightning, electrical discharge accompanied by thunder, commonly occurring during a thunderstorm. The discharge may take place between one part of a cloud and another part (intracloud), between one cl...

Burnham, Sherburne Wesley

(Encyclopedia)Burnham, Sherburne Wesley, 1838–1921, American astronomer, b. Thetford, Vt. After serving as observer at Dearborn Observatory, Chicago (1877–81, 1882–84), and as astronomer at Lick Observatory (...

Reber, Gröte

(Encyclopedia)Reber, Gröte, 1911–2002, American radio engineer, b. Chicago, Ill. After graduating from the Armour Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) in 1933, Reber worked for seve...

Lowell, Percival

(Encyclopedia)Lowell, Percival, 1855–1916, American astronomer, b. Boston, grad. Harvard, 1876; brother of Abbott Lawrence Lowell and Amy Lowell. He visited Korea and Japan, where he acted as counselor and foreig...

Kuhn, Thomas Samuel

(Encyclopedia)Kuhn, Thomas Samuel, 1922–96, American philosopher and historian of science, b. Cincinnati, Ohio. He trained as a physicist at Harvard (Ph.D. 1949), where he taught the history of science from 1948 ...

Copernicus, Nicholas

(Encyclopedia)Copernicus, Nicholas kōpûrˈnĭkəs [key], Pol. Mikotaj Kopérnik, 1473–1543, Polish astronomer. After studying astronomy at the Univ. of Kraków, he spent a number of years in Italy studying vari...

Hough, George Washington

(Encyclopedia)Hough, George Washington hŭf [key], 1836–1909, American astronomer, b. Montgomery co., N.Y., grad. Union College, 1856. He discovered 627 double stars and made systematic studies of the surface of ...