Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) draft, in banking, order by one party to another party to pay a stated sum to the person or firm in whose favor the draft is made. It is similar in form to the ordinary bank check. Often the drawer an...

(Encyclopedia) Comey, James Brien, Jr., 1960–, American law enforcement official, b. Yonkers, N.Y., grad. William and Mary, 1982, Univ. of Chicago Law School, 1985. He was assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern ...

(Encyclopedia) cabildo käbēlˈdō [key], autonomous municipal council, the lowest administrative unit in the Spanish government. The institution was especially influential in Spanish America, where it was set up i...

(Encyclopedia) calculus of variations, branch of mathematics concerned with finding maximum or minimum conditions for a relationship between two or more variables that depends not only on the variables themselves, a...

(Encyclopedia) Caligula kəlĭgˈyo͝olə [key], a.d. 12–a.d. 41, Roman emperor (a.d. 37–a.d. 41); son of Germanicus Caesar and Agrippina the Elder. His real name was Caius Caesar Germanicus. As a small child, h...

(Encyclopedia) hooks, bell, 1952–2021, American author, poet, social critic, and Black feminist, b. Hopkinsville, Ky., as Gloria Jean Watkins, Stanford Univ. (B.A., ...

(Encyclopedia) inert gas or noble gas, any of the elements in Group 18 of the periodic table. In order of increasing atomic number they are: helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon. They are colorless, odorle...

(Encyclopedia) infant respiratory distress syndrome (IRDS) or hyaline membrane disease hīˈəlĭn, –līnˌ [key], respiratory distress syndrome of newborns, most common in infants born prematurely or by cesarean ...

(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) amendment, in law, alteration of the provisions of a legal document. The term usually refers to the alteration of a statute or a constitution, but it is also applied in parliamentary law to proposed c...