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Walter, Thomas Ustick

(Encyclopedia)Walter, Thomas Ustick, 1804–87, American architect, b. Philadelphia. In 1819 he entered the office of William Strickland in Philadelphia as a student. In 1830 he began practice, the county prison (1...

Baade, Walter

(Encyclopedia)Baade, Walter välˈtər bäˈdə [key], 1893–1960, German-born American astronomer. From 1919 to 1931 he was on the staff of the Hamburg observatory; from 1931 to 1958, at the Mt. Wilson observator...

Map, Walter

(Encyclopedia)Map or Mapes, Walter, c.1140–c.1210, English author, b. Wales. A favorite of Henry II, he traveled with the king and became archdeacon of Oxford. The one work indubitably his, De nugis curialium [co...

white dwarf

(Encyclopedia)white dwarf, in astronomy, a type of star that is abnormally faint for its white-hot temperature (see mass-luminosity relation). Typically, a white dwarf star has the mass of the sun and the radius of...

white lead

(Encyclopedia)white lead, heavy, white substance, poisonous, insoluble in water, extensively used as a white pigment and base in paints. It is one of the oldest paint pigments used by humans. Chemically, it is basi...

Francis, Saint

(Encyclopedia)Francis, Saint, or Saint Francis of Assisi əsēˈzē [key], 1182?–1226, founder of the Franciscans, one of the greatest Christian saints, b. Assisi, Umbria, Italy. Two years before his death (122...

Francis, Dick

(Encyclopedia)Francis, Dick (Richard Stanley Francis), 1920–2010, English novelist. He was a champion steeplechase jockey (1946–57) and a racing writer for a London newspaper (1957–73). Francis parlayed his k...

white-eye

(Encyclopedia)white-eye, common name for warblerlike, arboreal birds, including 85 species in the family Zosteropidae, and for certain species of ducks. The members of Zosteropidae, with the exception of a few spec...

White, John, artist, cartographer, Virginia pioneer

(Encyclopedia)White, John, fl. 1585–93, artist, cartographer, and Virginia pioneer, b. probably in England. In 1585 he was commissioned to go with the expedition to Roanoke Island to depict life in the New World....

Gilbert, Walter

(Encyclopedia)Gilbert, Walter, 1932–, American molecular biologist, b. Boston, Ph.D. Cambridge, 1957. In 1968 he became a professor of biophysics at Harvard, where he had taught since 1959. He helped formulate a ...