Let me start with an example, not from my own research, but from that of J. Hillis Miller, a colleague at UC Irvine. Miller (2002) documents the lives of two middle-class white teenagers, Horace, in 1946, and Jimjim, in 2001. Horace, as a post-World War II teen, is totally wrapped up in the lives of books, from Alice and Wonderland to Wuthering Heights to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground...

multi-ethnic texture or existence of the ethnic-religious minorities is one of the main structural elements of states all over the world. consequently, we are sometimes informed about ethnic tensions and violence around the globe. a study in 2002 indicates that approximately 125 wars were occurred from world war ii to 1997 of which 80 ones have been related to ethnic and religious disputes in a...

Jean Leray (November 7, 1906–November 10, 1998) was confined to an officers’ prison camp (“Oflag”) in Austria for the whole of World War II. There he took up algebraic topology, and the result was a spectacular flowering of highly original ideas, ideas which have, through the usual metamorphism of history, shaped the course of mathematics in the sixty years since then. Today we would divide his...

In March 1908, the BASF at Ludwigshafen provided financial support to Fritz Haber in his attempt to synthesize ammonia from the elements. The process that now famously bears his name was demonstrated to BASF in July 1909. However, its engineer was Haber’s private assistant, Robert Le Rossignol, a young British chemist from the Channel Islands with whom Haber made a generous financial arrangemen...

In this paper, we look at the post World War II immigration and journey of a famous mathematician to the United States. Michel Loève, originally from Palestine, was a probabilist who studied mathematics at the Université de Paris under Paul Lévy. He ended his carrier in the Department of Statistics at Berkeley, with many other foreign mathematicians. Before and after his departure from France, ...

I n 1963, the IEEE awarded its Medal of Honor to George C. Southworth (Fig. 1). He was cited for ‘‘his pioneering contributions to microwave radio physics, to radio astronomy, and to waveguide transmission.’’ He spent most of his professional career with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). His experiments with waveguide transmission during the 1930s helped lay the foundation fo...

In March 1908, the BASF at Ludwigshafen provided financial support to Fritz Haber in his attempt to synthesize ammonia from the elements. The process that now famously bears his name was demonstrated to BASF in July 1909. However, its engineer was Haber’s private assistant, Robert Le Rossignol, a young British chemist from the Channel Islands with whom Haber made a generous financial arrangemen...