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city-state

(Encyclopedia)city-state, in ancient Greece, Italy, and Medieval Europe, an independent political unit consisting of a city and surrounding countryside. The first city-states were in Sumer, but they reached their p...

Cresilas

(Encyclopedia)Cresilas or Kresilas both: krĕsˈĭləs [key], fl. c.450 b.c., Greek sculptor, b. Crete. He worked at Athens. His statue of Pericles is the earliest Greek portrait statue that has been identified. ...

Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de

(Encyclopedia)Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de pyĕr lwē môrōˈ də mōpĕrtüēˈ [key], 1698–1759, French mathematician and astronomer. For his skillful support of Newton's theory he was admitted to the Ro...

Selten, Reinhard

(Encyclopedia)Selten, Reinhard (Reinhard Justus Reginald Selten), 1930–2016, German mathematician and economist, b. Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland), Ph.D. Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Univ., Frankfurt, 1961. He...

Turing machine

(Encyclopedia)Turing machine, a mathematical model of a device that computes via a series of discrete steps and is not limited in use by a fixed maximum amount of data storage. Introduced by the British mathematici...

Poincaré, Jules Henri

(Encyclopedia)Poincaré, Jules Henri zhül äNrēˈ pwăNkärāˈ [key], 1854–1912, French mathematician, physicist, and author. He was from 1881 connected with the faculty of sciences at the Univ. of Paris. One ...

Parra, Nicanor

(Encyclopedia)Parra, Nicanor nēkänōrˈ päˈrä [key], 1914–2018, Chilean poet, grad. Univ. of Chile (1938), studied at Brown, Oxford. A poet who was also a mathematician and physicist and a professor of theor...

Frege, Gottlob

(Encyclopedia)Frege, Gottlob gôtˈlōp frāˈgə [key], 1848–1925, German philosopher and mathematician. He was professor of mathematics (1879–1918) at the Univ. of Jena. Frege was one of the founders of moder...

Hooke, Robert

(Encyclopedia)Hooke, Robert ho͝ok [key], 1635–1703, English physicist, mathematician, and inventor. He became curator of experiments for the Royal Society (1662), professor of geometry at Gresham College (1665),...

Jeans, Sir James Hopwood

(Encyclopedia)Jeans, Sir James Hopwood, 1887–1946, English mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. He was professor of applied mathematics at Princeton (1905–9), later lectured at Cambridge (1910–12) and Ox...