Columbia Encyclopedia

Search results

155 results found

vernier

(Encyclopedia)vernier vûrˈnēr [key], auxiliary scale, either straight or an arc of a circle, designed to slide along a fixed scale. Its unit divisions, usually smaller than those on the fixed scale, permit a far...

particle accelerator

(Encyclopedia)CE5 Linear accelerator (LINAC) CE5 Cyclotron: As the charged particles move faster, they spiral out to the edge of the Ds. particle accelerator, apparatus used in nuclear physics to produce bea...

Krasznahorkai, Lázló

(Encyclopedia)Krasznahorkai, Lázló, 1954–, Hungarian writer known for his strange, bleak, obsessive, and surreal novels, short stories, and film scripts. Usually marked by grim rural settings, and often featuri...

Anouilh, Jean

(Encyclopedia)Anouilh, Jean zhäN änwēˈyə [key], 1910–87, French dramatist. Anouilh's many popular plays range from tragedy to sophisticated comedy. His first play, L'hermine, was published in 1932. During th...

American Film Institute

(Encyclopedia)American Film Institute (AFI), nonprofit organization established in Washington, D.C., in 1967 by the National Endowment for the Arts to preserve and catalog American films and television, to provide ...

Kantorovich, Leonid Vitalyevich

(Encyclopedia)Kantorovich, Leonid Vitalyevich lēˈənĭd vītalˈēyavĭch kəntorˈəvĭch [key], 1912–86, Soviet economist and mathematician, b. St. Petersburg, Russia. A professor at Leningrad State Univ. (19...

Greenberg, Clement

(Encyclopedia)Greenberg, Clement, 1909–94, American art critic, b. New York City. Greenberg's criticism was primarily concerned with art produced after abstract expressionism. This art, now known as color-field p...

Dufy, Raoul

(Encyclopedia)Dufy, Raoul räo͞olˈ düfēˈ [key], 1877–1953, French painter, illustrator, and decorator, studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. After meeting Matisse he abandoned his early impressionist style a...

Crivelli, Carlo

(Encyclopedia)Crivelli, Carlo krēvĕlˈlē [key], b. c.1430, d. after 1493, Venetian painter, who worked chiefly in the Marches. His paintings, notable for their rather harsh conception, include the Virgin and Chi...

momentum

(Encyclopedia)momentum mōmĕnˈtəm [key], in mechanics, the quantity of motion of a body, specifically the product of the mass of the body and its velocity. Momentum is a vector quantity; i.e., it has both a magn...