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Abbeville, town, France

(Encyclopedia)Abbeville äbvēlˈ [key], town, Somme dept., N France, in Picardy, on the Somme River. Sugar refining, brewing, iron working, and carpet manufacturing are the chief indus...

Bloch, Felix

(Encyclopedia)Bloch, Felix, 1905–83, American physicist, b. Zürich, Switzerland, Ph.D. Univ. of Leipzig, Germany, 1928. He was a professor at Stanford from 1934 until his retirement in 1971. Bloch and Edward Pur...

Boltzmann, Ludwig

(Encyclopedia)Boltzmann, Ludwig lo͝otˈvĭkh bôltsˈmän [key], 1844–1906, Austrian physicist, b. Vienna, educated at Univ. of Vienna. He began teaching (1869) at Graz Univ. In 1873 he became mathematics profes...

Boudin, Eugène Louis

(Encyclopedia)Boudin, Eugène Louis özhĕnˈ lwē bo͞odăNˈ [key], 1824–98, French painter. He began painting at 25 in Paris. His best-known paintings are beach scenes of Brittany, Normandy, and the Netherland...

DMX

(Encyclopedia)DMX,1970-2021, b. Mount Vernon, N.Y., as Earl Simmons. DMX grew up in Yonkers, NY, in the 1980s, in a highly dysfunctional family; abandoned by his fath...

Harrison, Jim

(Encyclopedia)Harrison, Jim (James Thomas Harrison), 1937–2016, American novelist, poet, and essayist, b. Grayling, Mich., grad. Michigan State Univ. (B.A., 1960; M.A., 1965). He began his writing career as a poe...

Breytenbach, Breyten

(Encyclopedia)Breytenbach, Breyten brīˈtən brīˈtənbäkh [key], 1939–, South African writer, painter, and activist. Although he is from a distinguished Afrikaner family, he soon became a committed opponent o...

Wilson, Lanford

(Encyclopedia)Wilson, Lanford, 1937–2011, American playwright, b. Lebanon, Mo. An important figure in modern drama, he was a master of earthy, realistic dialogue in which monologue, conversation, and direct addre...

Holocene epoch

(Encyclopedia)Holocene epoch hŏlˈəsēn [key] or Recent epoch, most recent of all subdivisions of geologic time, ranging from the present back to the time (c.11,000 years ago) of almost complete withdrawal of the...

tapeworm

(Encyclopedia)tapeworm, name for the parasitic flatworms forming the class Cestoda. All tapeworms spend the adult phase of their lives as parasites in the gut of a vertebrate animal (called the primary host). Most ...