Focus on Words

WORDS IN USE
Insert the words:
maths, discovered, antibiotic, completely, analyzed, disease. experiment
Sometimes luck can be a big help!
Sometimes scientific discoveries were made by accident. Two famous examples of
this are gravity and penicillin. Isaac Newton, who first used ... to describe gravity, was
sitting in his garden when he saw an apple fall-some say it fell on his head! This made
him think about why, and he realized he could explain it using mathematics. Alexander
Fleming. Penicillin, which was the first ... . It ... changed medicine. He was working in
the laboratory when he saw that something started growing on one of his ... . He ...it
and realized that it could be very useful in fighting ... .
Read the text and do the exercise.
Laying the pen in respect
Context
A Beautiful Mind is a biography of Nobel Prize-winner economist and mathematician John
Forbes Nash, Jr. The book is a detailed description of many aspects of Nash’s life, and a close
examination of his personality and motivations. Starting with his childhood, the book covers
Nash’s years at Princeton and MIT, his work for the RAND Corporation, his family and his
struggle with the disease that tortured him throughout his life.
Nash enrolled as a graduate student at Princeton in
1948 and almost immediately stood out as an odd duck. He
devoted himself to finding something unique, a
mathematical theorem that would be completely original.
He met and eventually married a graduate student, Alicia.
As his disease progressed, he painfully watched the burden
and loss his condition brought on his wife and friends. Yet
he created the theory of games for which he was awarded
the “Nobel Prize in Economics” in 1994.
The book won the 1998 National Book Critics Circle
Award for biography, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
for biography. It also appeared on the New York Times’
bestseller list for biography.
It is particularly notable for describing Nash’s genius
as well as his struggle with mental illness.
It inspired the 2001 film by the same name. The wellacted
film is both a moving love story and a revealing look at mental illness. The mathematics
in the film were well-praised by the mathematics community, including the real John Nash.
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