DAVID ADAIR   At the time of slide rules and fluorescent socks (considerably before the advent of the first PC: the Olivetti P-602 portable at mere 35 pounds), David Adair visited the underground Department of Defense complex known as Area 51. This leads to a Google outside link.

Joel Adair - There have been many theories developed through the centuries concerning the principles and applications of ethics. Each has a unique approach to determining ethical behavior based on the ideology upon which the theory is founded. Some of the theories have their roots in religion, others in philosophy and logic. While a thorough study of the important ethical philosophies is far beyond the scope of this work, a short discussion of some of the more prominent theories is in order to assess some of the tools available for ethical problem solving in engineering applications.

Abu Bekr ibn Muhammad ibn al-Husayn Al-Karaji
    The first comment that we must make regards al-Karaji's name. It appears both as al-Karaji and as al-Karkhi but this is not a simple matter of two different transliterations of the same Arabic name. The significance is that Karaj is a city in Iran and if the mathematician's name is al-Karaji then certainly his family were from that city.

Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi
    We know few details of Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi's life. One unfortunate effect of this lack of knowledge seems to be the temptation to make guesses based on very little evidence. In [1] Toomer suggests that the name al-Khwarizmi may indicate that he came from Khwarizm south of the Aral Sea in central Asia.

Ibn Yahya al-Maghribi Al-Samawal
    Al-Samawal's father was Abul-Abbas Yahya al-Maghribi, a Jewish scholar of religion and literature. Abul-Abbas was born in Fez in Morocco and later moved to Baghdad where he was living at the time of al-Samawal's birth. Al-Samawal's mother, Anna Isaac Levi, had moved from Basra in Iraq.

Anaximander was the author of the first surviving lines of western philosophy. He speculated and argued about 'the Boundless' as the origin of all that is. He also worked on the fields of what we now call geography and biology. Moreover, Anaximander was the first speculative astronomer.  He originated the world-picture of the open universe, which replaced the closed universe of the celestial vault.

Aryabhata the Elder
    Aryabhata is also known as Aryabhata I to distinguish him from the later mathematician of the same name who lived about 400 years later. Al-Biruni has not helped in understanding Aryabhata's life, for he seemed to believe that there were two different mathematicians called Aryabhata living at the same time. He therefore created a confusion of two different Aryabhatas which was not clarified until 1926 when B Datta showed that al-Biruni's two Aryabhatas were one and the same person.

George Berkeley (1685-1753) was one of the three most famous eighteenth century British Empiricists (see LOCKE, JOHN and HUME, DAVID). He is best known for his motto, esse is percipi, to be is to be perceived. He was an idealist: everything that exists is either a mind or depends for its existence upon a mind.

Bhaskara is also known as Bhaskara II or as Bhaskaracharya, this latter name meaning
"Bhaskara the Teacher". Since he is known in India as Bhaskaracharya we will refer to him throughout this article by that name.

Brahmagupta, whose father was Jisnugupta, wrote important works on mathematics and
astronomy. In particular he wrote Brahmasphutasiddhanta (The Opening of the Universe), in 628.

George Bush - In his State of the Union address, President Bush discussed the serious challenges facing our Nation and the steps we must take to make America a more secure, more prosperous, and more hopeful country.  Girolamo or Hieronimo Cardano's name was Hieronymus Cardanus in Latin and he is sometimes known by the English version of his name Jerome Cardan.

Girolamo Cardano was the illegitimate child of Fazio Cardano and Chiara Micheria. His father was a lawyer in Milan but his expertise in mathematics was such that he was consulted by Leonardo da Vinci on questions of geometry. In addition to his law practice, Fazio lectured on geometry, both at the University of Pavia and, for a longer spell, at the Piatti foundation in Milan.

Charles Augustin Coulomb  In Paris he entered the Collège Mazarin, where he received a good classical grounding in language, literature, and philosophy, and he received the best available teaching in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry and botany.

Democritus of Abdera is best known for his atomic theory but he was also an excellent geometer.  Very little is known of his life but we know that Leucippus was his teacher.

René Descartes was a philosopher whose work, La géométrie, includes his application of algebra to geometry from which we now have Cartesian geometry.

Paul Dirac had already made an excellent start to his research career, even more impressive work was to follow. This was as a result of Dirac being given proofs of a paper by Heisenberg to read in the summer of 1925. The significance of the algebraic properties of Heisenberg's commutators struck Dirac when he was out for a walk in the country. He realised that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle was a statement of the noncommutativity of the quantum mechanical observables.

Arthur Eddington was a Smith's prize winner for an essay on the proper motions of stars in 1907, and he was awarded a Trinity College Fellowship. George Darwin, a son of Charles Darwin and Plumian professor of astronomy at Cambridge, died in December 1912. In 1913 Eddington was appointed to fill the vacant position of Plumian Professor of Astronomy.

Around 1886 Albert Einstein began his school career in Munich. As well as his violin lessons, which he had from age six to age thirteen, he also had religious education at home where he was taught Judaism.

Ernst Mach was born in Chrlice (now part of Brno), Czech Republic. He was educated at home until the age of 14, then went briefly to gymnasium before entering the University of Vienna at 17.  There he studied mathematics, physics and philosophy, and received a doctorate in physics in 1860. His early work was focused on Doppler effect in optics and acoustics.

Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) is one of the world's most famous graphic artists. His art is    enjoyed by millions of people all over the world, as can be seen on the many web sites on the internet.

Euclid of Alexandria is the most prominent mathematician of antiquity best known for his treatise on mathematics The Elements. The long lasting nature of The Elements must make Euclid the leading mathematics teacher of all time.

Rabbi Ben Ezra lived in Muslim Spain. Little is known of his life except that he was on friendly terms with the eminent poet and philosopher Judah ha-Levi, who some historians believe was ibn Ezra's father-in-law. Ibn Ezra made his reputation as a scholar and a poet. It is recorded that during this period of his life, up to 1140, he travelled to North Africa and possibly visited Egypt.

Leonardo Pisano is better known by his nickname Fibonacci. He was the son of Guilielmo and a member of the Bonacci family. Fibonacci himself sometimes used the name Bigollo, which may mean good-for-nothing or a traveller.

Thomas Van Flandern, PhD. Sept. 1990 - Present:  Founder and President, Meta Research, Inc., whose goal is to do astronomy research wherever promising avenues of advancement are blocked by funding authorities solely because the research results might conflict with an accepted paradigm.

Galileo Galilei's parents were Vincenzo Galilei and Guilia Ammannati. Vincenzo, who was born in Florence in 1520, was a teacher of music and a fine lute player. After studying music in Venice he carried out experiments on strings to support his musical theories.

Gell-Mann, Murray (b. Sept. 15, 1929, New York, N.Y., U.S.), American physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics for 1969 for his work pertaining to the classification of subatomic particles and their interactions.

Kurt Gödel's father was Rudolf Gödel whose family were from Vienna. Rudolf did not take his academic studies far as a young man, but had done well for himself becoming managing director and part owner of a major textile firm in Brünn.

Adolph Hitler's rise and acquisition of power in 1933 is an amazing feat. This section looks at the route to Hitler gaining power. The Nazi Party started out as a small party in Bavaria called the German worker's party. They were opposed to the Treaty of Versailles and Communism.

William Horner was educated at Kingswood School Bristol. At the almost unbelievable age of 14 he became an assistant master at Kingswood school in 1800 and headmaster 4 years later. He left Bristol and founded his own school in 1809 in Bath.

Fred Hoyle's parents were Ben Hoyle and Mabel Pickard. Mabel's father had died when she was a small child. As a young girl she had worked in a mill in Bingley and had saved up enough money to study music at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Edwin Hubble was a man who changed our view of the Universe. In 1929 he showed that galaxies are moving away from us with a speed proportional to their distance. The explanation is simple, but revolutionary: the Universe is expanding.

Carl Gustav Jung was born July 26, 1875, in the small Swiss village of Kessewil. His father was Paul Jung, a country parson, and his mother was Emilie Preiswerk Jung. He was surrounded by a fairly well educated extended family, including quite a few clergymen and some eccentrics as well.

Johannes Kepler is now chiefly remembered for discovering the three laws of planetary motion that bear his name published in 1609 and 1619). He also did important work in optics (1604, 1611), discovered two new regular polyhedra (1619), gave the first mathematical treatment of close packing of equal spheres (leading to an explanation of the shape of the cells of a honeycomb, 1611), gave the first proof of how logarithms worked (1624), and devised a method of finding the volumes of solids of revolution that (with hindsight!) can be seen as contributing to the development of calculus (1615, 1616).

Gottfried Leibniz was the son of Friedrich Leibniz, a professor of moral philosophy at Leipzig. Leibniz's mother was Catharina Schmuck, the daughter of a lawyer and Friedrich Leibniz's third wife. However, Friedrich Leibniz died when Leibniz was only six years old and he was brought up by his mother. Certainly Leibniz learnt his moral and religious values from her which would play an important role in his life and philosophy.

In January 1933, the Belgian mathematician and Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre traveled with Albert Einstein to California for a series of seminars. After the Belgian detailed his Big Bang theory, Einstein stood up applauded, and said, “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.

Leucippus  (fifth century BCE.) was the founder of Atomism. We know next to nothing about his life, and his book appears to have been incorporated in the collected works of Democritus. No writer subsequent to Theophrastos seems to have been able to distinguish his teaching from that of his more famous disciple. Indeed his very existence has been denied, though on wholly insufficient grounds.

Li Zhi is also known as Li Chih or Li Ye, Li Yeh. Usually Chinese names have a number of different spellings, each trying in a different way to match the pronunciation of the original. However this is not the reason that Li Zhi is also known as Li Yeh. Rather it is because he was known as a young man as Li Zhi, but since this was the same name as the third T'ang emperor, he later changed his name to Li Yeh.

Linda Lingle - How come a native Hawaiian is not governor, or maybe even George Peabody: the M.A.N.?   Hawaii has always been so  layback...except during the Kamayamaya wars and the advent of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and before mosquitos were brought in by the whalers.  But with the election of Lingle, there are new horizons.

SETH LLOYD is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and a principal investigator at the Research Laboratory of Electronics. He is also adjunct assistant professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He works on problems having to do with information and complex systems from the very small—how do atoms process information, how can you make them compute, to the very large — how does society process information?

Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevskii's father Ivan Maksimovich Lobachevskii, worked as a clerk in an office which was involved in land surveying while Nikolai Ivanovich's mother was Praskovia Alexandrovna Lobachevskaya. Nikolai Ivanovich was one of three sons in this poor family. When Nikolai Ivanovich was seven years of age his father died and, in 1800, his mother moved with her three sons to the city of Kazan in western Russia on the edge of Siberia. There the boys attended Kazan Gymnasium, financed by government scholarships, with Nikolai Ivanovich entering the school in 1802.

Mahavira (or Mahaviracharya meaning Mahavira the Teacher) was of the Jaina religion and was familiar with Jaina mathematics. He worked in Mysore in southern Indian where he was a member of a school of mathematics. If he was not born in Mysore then it is very likely that he was born close to this town in the same region of India.

James Clerk Maxwell was born at 14 India Street in Edinburgh, a house built by his parents in the 1820s, but shortly afterwards his family moved to their home at Glenlair in Kirkcudbrightshire about 20 km from Dumfries. There he enjoyed a country upbringing and his natural curiosity displayed itself at an early age.

Otto Neugebauer became interested in mathematics while at school but, in 1917, he joined the Austrian army to avoid having to take his final school examinations. In 1918 the war ended and he became a prisoner of the Italians. He was held in a prison camp in Italy along with another Austrian who has achieved world-wide fame, namely Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Isaac Newton's life can be divided into three quite distinct periods. The first is his boyhood days from 1643 up to his appointment to a chair in 1669. The second period from 1669 to 1687 was the highly productive period in which he was Lucasian professor at Cambridge. The third period (nearly as long as the other two combined) saw Newton as a highly paid government official in London with little further interest in mathematical research.

Thomas Paine  was not the first, as some have said, to advocate the aboliton of slavery in Amerca, he was certainly one of the earliest and most influential. The essay was written in 1774 and published March 8, 1775 when it appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser. Just a few weeks later on April 14, 1775 the first anti-slavery society in America was formed in Philadelphia. Paine was a founding member.

Max Planck came from an academic family, his father Julius Wilhelm Planck being Professor of Constitutional Law in the University of Kiel at the time of his birth, and both his grandfather and great-grandfather had been professors of theology at Göttingen.

Claudius Ptolemy - One of the most influential Greek astronomers and geographers of his time, Ptolemy propounded the geocentric theory in a form that prevailed for 1400 years. However, of all the ancient Greek mathematicians, it is fair to say that his work has generated more discussion and argument than any other. We shall discuss the arguments below for, depending on which are correct, they portray Ptolemy in very different lights. The arguments of some historians show that Ptolemy was a mathematician of the very top rank, arguments of others show that he was no more than a superb expositor, but far worse, some even claim that he committed a crime against his fellow scientists by betraying the ethics and integrity of his profession.

Pythagoras of Samos is often described as the first pure mathematician. He is an extremely important figure in the development of mathematics yet we know relatively little about his mathematical achievements. Unlike many later Greek mathematicians, where at least we have some of the books which they wrote, we have nothing of Pythagoras's writings. The society which he led, half religious and half scientific, followed a code of secrecy which certainly means that today Pythagoras is a mysterious figure.

Qin Jiushao, also known as Ch'in Chiu-Shao, was born at the time of the Nan (Southern) Sung dynasty. His ancestors came from Lu-chun in Shantung province and some biographies quote this incorrectly as his birthplace. His father, Qin Jiuyu (or Ch'in Chiu-yu), was a graduate who worked as an official in local administration. In around 1219, when Qin was about seventeen years old, his father was working as a prefect of Bazhou. At this time Qin volunteered for the army, which was putting down a rebellion, and served for a while.

Bernhard Riemann's father, Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, was a Lutheran minister. Friedrich Riemann married Charlotte Ebell when he was in his middle age. Bernhard was the second of their six children, two boys and four girls. Friedrich Riemann acted as teacher to his children and he taught Bernhard until he was ten years old. At this time a teacher from a local school named Schulz assisted in Bernhard's education.

Ruan Yuan is also known as Juan Yuan. He came from a distinguished Yangzhou family, with his grandfather having been Major General of Hunan province. The city of Yangzhou where Ruan was born is about halfway between Nanjing and Shanghai. It is in Jiangsu province which is bordered to the east by the Yellow Sea. Ruan obtained his master's degree in 1786 and, three years later, passed the civil service examinations and was appointed to the Hanlin Imperial Academy, the highest academic institution in China.

In 1799 Paolo Ruffini published a book on the theory of equations with his claim that quintics could not be solved by radicals as the title shows: General theory of equations in which it is shown that the algebraic solution of the general equation of degree greater than four is impossible. Quadratic equations (of degree 2) had been known to be soluble by radicals from the time of the Babylonians. The cubic equation had been solved by radicals by del Ferro, Tartaglia and Cardan. Ferrari had solved the quartic by radicals in 1540 and so 250 years had passed without anyone being able to solve the quintic by radicals despite the attempts of many mathematicians. Among those who had made serious attempts to understand the problem were Tschirnhaus, Euler, Bézout, Vandermonde, Waring and Lagrange.

Rumford, Benjamin Thompson (1753-1814) - American-British physicist and scoundrel who, while drilling out cannons in the Munich munitions works, noticed that the canon became hot as long as the friction of boring continued. Furthermore, Rumford observed, the amount of heat released would be sufficient to completely melt the canon if it could be returned to the metal.

Nikola Tesla -  The Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, and scientist.   Born on July 9/10, 1856 in Smiljan, Lika (Austria-Hungary) Died on January 7, 1943 in New York City, New York (USA)  Inventions: a telephone repeater, rotating magnetic field principle, polyphase alternating-current system, induction motor, alternating-current power transmission, Tesla coil transformer, wireless communication, radio, fluorescent lights, and more than 700 other patents.

Alfred North Whitehead - Whitehead is perhaps best known for his collaboration with Bertrand Russell on the Principia Mathematica.  Their collaboration on Principia Mathematica appears to have begun near the end of 1900, although both men failed to remember the exact time their collaboration began when interviewed late in their lives. In fact they had attended the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900 and there they had learnt about Peano's work on the foundations of mathematics. This led to them study Peano's papers and this must have been a major factor in getting their collaboration started.  Their joint work attempted to construct the foundations of mathematics on a rigorous logical basis and it was carried out with Russell as the philosopher on the project and Whitehead as the mathematician.

Wilhelm Wien worked at the Physikalisch- Technische Reichsanstalt in Berlin- Charlottenburg where he was a colleague of Planck. Wien was appointed professor of physics at Giessen in 1899 and professor of physics at Munich in 1920. In 1893 Wien stated his displacement law of blackbody radiation spectra at different temperatures.

Simon Wiesenthal (1908 - 2005) was one of the lucky few who survived the Nazi death         camps of World War II. Unlike many other survivors however, Mr. Wiesenthal did not return to his pre-War profession as an architect, but instead became the world famous Nazi hunter, the conscience and voice for not only the Holocaust's 6,000,000 Jewish victims but for the millions of    others who were murdered by the Nazis as well.

Little is known about Yang Hui other than that he wrote several outstanding mathematical texts. He was a contemporary of both Qin Jiushao and Li Zhi, which we know from the dates on which his texts appeared, showing that he lived towards the end of the Nan (Southern) Sung dynasty. However, both Qin and Li's major works appeared about fifteen years before the first work of Yang. Zhu Shijie was only born about the time Yang Hui's first texts were appearing so his life also overlapped that of Yang.
 

Zhang Heng was born at the time of the Eastern Han (sometimes called Later Han) dynasty, the second half of the longest lasting Chinese dynasty.  Zhang, who had been born into an important family, was educated in the moral and political philosophy of Confucianism. For ten years he studied literature and trained as a writer. He published a number of literary works which gained him considerable fame.  Zhang was thirty years old before his interests turned from literature to scientific matters, and at that time he became particularly interested in astronomy.

Zhu Shijie is also known as Chu Shih-Chieh. Little is known about his life other than that he wrote two outstanding mathematical texts. He must have been born around the time that Qin Jiushao died, which was about the same time that Yang Hui's first texts were appearing, and he probably was not very old when Li Zhi died. Zhu was, therefore, the last of these four great thirteenth century Chinese mathematicians but it would appear from his writings that he was unaware of the work of his three famous predecessors.