Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Grimaldi, Joseph grĭmălˈdē [key], 1779–1837, English pantomime actor and clown. He made his debut at the age of three in Robinson Crusoe at Sadler's Wells, London. For many years he performed th...

(Encyclopedia) Woodland, city (1990 pop. 39,802), seat of Yolo co., N central Calif., in a fertile farm area yielding tomatoes, wheat, rice, beans, vegetables, walnuts, almonds, melons, safflower, and sugar beets; i...

(Encyclopedia) Achard, Franz Karl fränts kärl äkhˈärt [key], 1753–1821, German chemist. He made pioneering use of the discovery by his countryman Andreas Marggraf of sugar in beet...

(Encyclopedia) Siegbahn, Karl Manne Georg, 1886–1978, Swedish physicist. In 1913, he began a series of experiments that led to the discovery of the M series of X rays and demonstrated the shell arrangement of elec...

(Encyclopedia) Barkla, Charles Glover glŭˈvər bärˈklə [key], 1877–1944, English physicist. He was professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh from 1913. For his discovery of the characteristic X rays of ele...

(Encyclopedia) maroon, term for a fugitive slave in the 17th and 18th cent. in the West Indies and Guiana, or for a descendant of such slaves. They were called marron by the French and cimarrón by the Spanish. Form...

(Encyclopedia) Fernald, Merritt Lyndon fûrˈnəld [key], 1873–1950, American botanist, b. Orono, Maine, grad. Harvard, 1897. He taught at Harvard (1902–49) and was director of the Gray Herbarium there from 1937...

(Encyclopedia) Róheim, Géza, 1891–1953, Hungarian anthropologist and psychoanalyst. He was educated at the universities of Leipzig, Berlin, and Budapest (Ph.D., 1914). From 1928 to 1931 he did fieldwork in centr...

(Encyclopedia) Tehran or Teheran both: tāˌəränˈ, –rănˈ [key], city (1991 pop. 6,475,527), capital of Iran and Tehran prov., N Iran, near Mt. Damavand. It is Iran's largest city and its administrative, comme...

(Encyclopedia) hyperinsulinism, presence in the system of an above-normal amount of insulin, the substance secreted by the pancreas and needed by the body to utilize sugar. An increased amount of insulin in the body...