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Williamson, Hugh

(Encyclopedia)Williamson, Hugh, 1735–1819, American political leader, physician, and scientist, b. West Nottingham, Pa. He studied theology, preached for a short time, and then was (1760–63) professor of mathem...

Haldane, Frederick Duncan Michael

(Encyclopedia)Haldane, Frederick Duncan Michael, 1951–, British physicist, b. London, England, Ph.D. Cambridge, 1978. Haldane taught at the Univ. of Southern California (1981–85, 1987–90) and worked at Bell L...

Weierstrass, Karl Wilhelm Theodor

(Encyclopedia)Weierstrass, Karl Wilhelm Theodor kärl vĭlˈhĕlm tāˈōdōr vīˈərshträs [key], 1815–97, German mathematician. From 1864 he was professor of mathematics at the Univ. of Berlin. His developmen...

Lubbock, Sir John

(Encyclopedia)Lubbock, Sir John lŭbˈək [key], 1834–1913, English banker, statesman, and naturalist. As a member of Parliament from 1870, he introduced many reform bills, especially in banking, including legisl...

ring, mathematical system

(Encyclopedia)ring, in mathematics, system consisting of a set R of elements and two binary operations, such that addition makes R a commutative group and multiplication is associative and distributes over addition...

McBay, Shirley

(Encyclopedia) McBay, Shirley , 1935-2021, American mathematician and educator, b. Bainbridge, Ga.,as Shirley Ann Mathis, Paine College (B.S., 1954), Atlanta Univ. (M...

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...