Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Brown, Gordon (James Gordon Brown), 1951–, British politician. From 1975 to 1980 he taught at Edinburgh Univ. and Glasgow College of Technology; he then joined Scottish Television (1980–83) as a j...

(Encyclopedia) diesel engine, type of internal-combustion engine invented by the German engineer Rudolf Diesel and patented by him in 1892. Although his engine was designed to use coal dust as fuel, the diesel engin...

(Encyclopedia) Lumumba, Patrice Emergy pətrēsˈ ĕmârzhēˈ lo͞omo͞omˈbä [key], 1925–61, pr...

(Encyclopedia) McNamara, Robert Strange măkˈnəmârˌə [key], 1916–2009, U.S. secretary of defense (1961–68), b. San Francisco, grad Univ. of California, Berkeley (B.A., 1937), Harvard (M.B.A., 1939). He taug...

(Encyclopedia) Gao Xingjian gouˈ shĭingˈjyänˈ [key], 1940–, Chinese-French novelist and playwright, b. Ganzhou. He earned (1962) a degree in French in Beijing and embarked upon a literary life, which was cut ...

(Encyclopedia) Lessing, Doris, 1919–2013, British novelist, b. Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran) as Doris May Tayler. Largely self-educated, she was brought up on a farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and in 194...

(Encyclopedia) Mills, Charles W., 1951–2021, philosopher and political theorist, b. London, Ph.D. University of Toronto, 1985. Born in the U.K. and raised in Jamaica...

(Encyclopedia) James, C. L. R., 1901–1989, Trinidadian historian, journalist, and communist activist, b. Tunapuna, Trinidad and Tobago. A social theorist, anti-colon...

(Encyclopedia) navigation, science and technology of finding the position and directing the course of vessels and aircraft. The next great revolution in navigation occurred in the 20th cent., when radio signals ...

(Encyclopedia) Deep Sea Drilling Project, U.S. program designed to investigate the evolution of ocean basins by core drilling of ocean sediments and underlying oceanic crust. Funded by the National Science Foundatio...