Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) American Film Institute (AFI), nonprofit organization established in Washington, D.C., in 1967 by the National Endowment for the Arts to preserve and catalog American films and television, to provide ...

(Encyclopedia) Commerce, United States Department of, federal executive department charged with promoting U.S. economic development and technological advancement. In Feb., 1903, the Congress established a Department...

(Encyclopedia) Knuth, Donald Ervin no͞oth, kəno͞othˈ [key], 1938–, American mathematician and computer scientist, b. Milwaukee, Wis., grad. Case Institute of Technology (B.S. and M.S., 1960) and California Ins...

(Encyclopedia) Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, cultural and educational institution founded in 1823 in Brooklyn, N.Y., as the Brooklyn Apprentices' Library Association. The scope was broadened in 1843 and t...

(Encyclopedia) Vancouver, city (1991 pop. 471,844), SW British Columbia, Canada, on Burrard Inlet of the Strait of Georgia, opposite Vancouver Island and just N of the Wash. border. It is the largest city on Canada'...

(Encyclopedia) Mount Wilson Observatory, astronomical observatory located in California on Mt. Wilson, near Pasadena. Mt. Wilson Observatory was founded in 1904 by George E. Hale. Its equipment includes 100-in. (2.5...

(Encyclopedia) Esalen Institute, organization est. 1962 by Michael Murphy and Richard Price that was an important center for the so-called human potential movement of the 1960s and 70s. Located in Big Sur, Calif., a...

(Encyclopedia) Pierce, John, 1910–2002, American electrical engineer, b. Des Moines, Iowa, grad. California Institute of Technology (Ph.D. 1936). Pierce worked at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he proposed...

(Encyclopedia) Phillips, William Daniel, 1948–, American physicist, b. Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1976. He has been a researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Tech...

(Encyclopedia) Cornell, Eric Allin, 1961–, American physicist, b. Palo Alto, Calif., Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990. Since 1990, he has been a researcher at the Joint Institute for Laboratory As...