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McDonald Observatory

(Encyclopedia)McDonald Observatory, astronomical observatory located on Mt. Locke, near Fort Davis, Tex.; founded in 1932, sponsored by the Univ. of Texas in cooperation with the Univ. of Chicago. Its equipment inc...

Kosterlitz, John Michael

(Encyclopedia)Kosterlitz, John Michael, 1943–, British physicist, b. Scotland, Ph.D. Oxford, 1969. He was on the faculty at the Univ. of Birmingham, England, from 1974 to 1982, when he became a professor at Brown...

Anderson, Margaret C.

(Encyclopedia)Anderson, Margaret C., 1886–1973, American author, editor, and publisher, b. Indianapolis, Ind. As editor and publisher of The Little Review (1914–29), one of the most famous of the American littl...

Gall, Francis Joseph

(Encyclopedia)Gall, Francis Joseph, 1758–1828, Austrian anatomist and founder of phrenology. He devoted most of his life to a minute study of the nervous system, especially the brain. With the collaboration of a ...

Husain, M. F.

(Encyclopedia)Husain, M. F. (Maqbool Fida Husain), 1915–2011, Indian painter. Often called the Picasso of India, he is known for brightly colored modernist paintings of mythical and religious figures. Although a ...

Altdorfer, Albrecht

(Encyclopedia)Altdorfer, Albrecht älˈbrĕkht ältdôrˈfər [key], 1480–1538, German painter and engraver. He served as city architect of Regensburg, where much of his life was spent. Although influenced by Dü...

Shechtman, Daniel S.

(Encyclopedia)Shechtman, Daniel S., 1941–, Israeli materials scientist, Ph.D. Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), 1972. Shechtman, who joined the faculty at Technion in 1975, received the Nobel Prize in Ch...

Bagnold, Enid

(Encyclopedia)Bagnold, Enid băgˈnəld [key], 1889–1981, English novelist and playwright, b. Rochester, Kent, England. She was a nurse in a military hospital in World War I. In 1920 she married Sir Roderick Jone...

photorealism

(Encyclopedia)photorealism, international art movement of the late 1960s and 70s that stressed the precise rendering of subject matter, often taken from actual photographs or painted with the aid of slides. Also kn...

purification

(Encyclopedia)purification, in religion, the ceremonial removal of what the religion deems unclean. The usual agents of purification are water (as in baptism), bodily alteration (as in circumcision), and fire. The ...