Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Willis Tower, formerly the Sears Tower, Chicago, the second tallest building in the United States. Until the completion of the 1,483-ft (452-m) Petronas Towers (1998) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, it was...

(Encyclopedia) ring, in mathematics, system consisting of a set R of elements and two binary operations, such that addition makes R a commutative group and multiplication is associative and distributes over addition...

(Encyclopedia) Saint Helier sānt hĕlˈyər, Fr. săNtālyāˈ [key], town (1991 pop. 24,941), capital of Jersey, Channel Islands, Great Britain, on St. Aubin's Bay. The administrative and cultural center of Jersey...

(Encyclopedia) Bruna, Dick (Hendrick Magdalenus Bruna), 1927–2017, Dutch children's book author and illustrator, b. Utrecht. The author of more than 120 books, Bruna is best known for his stories about a white rab...

(Encyclopedia) escape velocity, the velocity a body must be given in order to escape the gravitational hold of some other larger body, e.g., the earth, moon, or sun. A body given less than the escape velocity will f...

(Encyclopedia) Greeneville, town (2020 pop. 15,479), seat of Greene co., NE Tenn., in a tobacco, dairy, and cattle area; founded 1783, inc. 1875. It is a leading tobac...

(Encyclopedia) Gabriel, Jacques Ange zhäk äNzh gäbrēĕlˈ [key], 1698–1782, French architect of the classical tradition. Descendant of a long line of architects, he ranks as one of the most distinguished Frenc...

(Encyclopedia) Doric order, earliest of the orders of architecture developed by the Greeks and the one that they employed for most buildings. It is generally believed that the column and its capital derive from an e...

(Encyclopedia) Communist party, in China, ruling party of the world's most populous nation since 1949 and most important Communist party in the world since the disintegration of the USSR in 1991. After the People'...

(Encyclopedia) Lichfield, town (1991 pop. 25,408) and district, Staffordshire, W central England. Lichfield is a market town with light industries, famous for its three-spired cathedral and its close associations wi...