Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Aldrin, Buzz ôlˈdrĭn [key] (Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Jr.), 1930–, American astronaut, b. Montclair, N.J. After graduating from West Point (1951), Aldrin joined the U.S. air force and flew 66 combat m...

(Encyclopedia) finance, theory and practice of conducting large public and private dealings in money. Important institutions of private finance include those that deal with insurance, banking, stocks (see stock), bo...

(Encyclopedia) Unicode yo͞oˈnĭkōdˌ [key], set of codes used to represent letters, numbers, control characters, and the like, designed for use internationally in computers. It has been expanded to include such i...

(Encyclopedia) Gall gôl [key], c.1840–1894, war chief of the Sioux, b. South Dakota. He refused to accept the treaty of 1868 (by which he would have been confined to a reservation), joined Sitting Bull and other ...

(Encyclopedia) MacArthur, Douglas, 1880–1964, American general, b. Little Rock, Ark.; son of Arthur MacArthur. At the beginning (1950) of the Korean War he was appointed commander of UN military forces in South ...

(Encyclopedia) Air Force, United States Department of the, military department within the U.S. Dept. of Defense (see Defense, United States Department of). The Air Force traces its roots to the founding of the Aeron...

(Encyclopedia) Paik, Nam June näm jo͞on pīk [key], 1932–2006, Korean-American artist, widely considered the founder of video art, b. Seoul, studied art and music at Tokyo Univ. and in Germany. A performance and...

(Encyclopedia) Ganghwa, Kanghwa, or Kanghoa all: gängˈhwäˈ [key], administrative district, 163 sq m...

(Encyclopedia) Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, at Stanford, Calif. It was established in 1919 as the Hoover War Library by Herbert Hoover to extend his collection of documents of World War I, but i...

(Encyclopedia) helicopter, type of aircraft in which lift is obtained by means of one or more power-driven horizontal propellers called rotors. When the rotor of a helicopter turns it produces reaction torque which ...