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Lovelace, Ada

(Encyclopedia)Lovelace, Ada (Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace), 1815–1852, English mathematician, b. London as Augusta Ada Byron. The daughter of the poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke, she was...

associative law

(Encyclopedia)associative law, in mathematics, law holding that for a given operation combining three quantities, two at a time, the initial pairing is arbitrary; e.g., using the operation of addition, the numbers ...

Beijing University

(Encyclopedia)Beijing University or Peking University, at Beijing, China; founded as Metropolitan Univ. 1898, renamed Peking Univ. 1911, absorbed nontechnical departments of Tsinghua Univ. and merged with and moved...

distributive law

(Encyclopedia)distributive law. In mathematics, given any two operations, symbolized by * and ∘, the first operation, *, is distributive over the second, ∘, if a*(b∘c)=(a*b)∘(a*c) for all possible choices o...

Unabomber

(Encyclopedia)Unabomber or Unabomer both: yo͞oˈnəbŏmˌər [key], name given by the FBI to the elusive perpetrator of a series of bombings (1975–95) in the United States that killed 3 and wounded 23. The targe...

Archimedes

(Encyclopedia)Archimedes ärkĭmēˈdēz [key], 287–212 b.c., Greek mathematician, physicist, and inventor. He is famous for his work in geometry (on the circle, sphere, cylinder, and parabola), physics, mechanic...

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...

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 ...

Fisher, Irving

(Encyclopedia)Fisher, Irving, 1867–1947, American economist, b. Saugerties, N.Y., Ph.D. Yale, 1891. He began teaching at Yale in 1890 and was active there until 1935. His earliest work was in mathematics, and he ...

cylinder

(Encyclopedia)CE5 Cylinder cylinder, in mathematics, surface generated by a line moving parallel to a given fixed line and continually intersecting a given fixed curve called the directrix; each line of the fam...