Mystery Math Portraits by Alfred Eisenstaedt for Life = unpublished book
Time Magazine has already opened its archives, and now Time/Life and Google have an index to Life Magazine’s photographs. This is great news, because Life chronicled and portraited America in photographs; and no one better than the great photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. He gave us “the kiss” and Marilyn Monroe.
Apparently, in 1962/3 mathematician/computer scientist Dr. John G. Kemeny was preparing a math book using Eisenstaedt’s portraits of famous scientists. There are over 30 in the archives, including a famous picture of Kurt Godel, a great shot of the wonderful Stanislaw Ulam, and some other facinating portraits.
But who are they? Is that Eugene Wigner? The captions don’t say. I invite elucidation.
January 17th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
[...] on the Chromatic Number of Lichtenstein. John Kemeny has photos of mathematicians … and more of the same … but is looking for their names. They come from Time/Life’s archives. Ξ at 360 found [...]
December 7th, 2009 at 2:10 am
That’s Claude Shannon from Bell Labs, below Stanislaw Ulam.