Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Mondavi, Robert Gerald məndäˈvē [key], 1913–2008, American vintner who was in the forefront of establishing California as a major table-wine-producing region and wine as a staple of the American...

(Encyclopedia) Khan, Ali Akbar älēˈ ăkˈbär khän [key], 1922–2009, Indian musician, b. Shivpur, East Bengal (now Bangladesh). A master of the sarod, a lutelike 25-stringed N Indian instrument, Khan was born ...

(Encyclopedia) Wright, Richard, 1908–60, American author. An African American born on a Mississippi plantation, Wright struggled through a difficult childhood and worked to educate himself. He moved to Chicago in ...

(Encyclopedia) Steitz, Thomas Arthur, 1940–2018, American biophysicist and biochemist, b. Milwaukee, Ph.D. Harvard, 1966. Steitz was a professor at Yale from 1970 and a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Inst...

(Encyclopedia) halo, in meteorology, short-lived circles or arcs, and less commonly spikes and crosses, of colored or whitish light surrounding the moon or sun or in clouds as seen from above. A halo occurs when the...

(Encyclopedia) Leyner, Mark, 1956–, American writer, b. Jersey City, N.J. His hyperliterate postmodernist short stories, collected in I Smell Esther Williams (1983), My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990), and To...

(Encyclopedia) Malatya mälätˈyä [key], city (1990 pop. 276,666), capital of Malatya prov., E central Turkey, in the E Taurus Mts. It is the commercial center for a rich farm region that produces apricots, grapes...

(Encyclopedia) Biot, Jean Baptiste zhäN bätēstˈ byō [key], 1774–1862, French physicist, grad. École Polytechnique (1797). He taught mathematics at Beauvais before becoming (1800) professor of mathematical ph...

(Encyclopedia) Cap-Haïtien käp-äēsyăNˈ [key], city, N Haiti, on the Atlantic Ocean. Haiti's second largest city, ...

(Encyclopedia) Cohnheim, Julius yo͞oˈlyo͝os kōnˈhīm [key], 1839–84, German experimental histologist and pathologist. In a relatively brief life Cohnheim made a series of remarkable contributions to the rapid...