From a Low Seat, Higher Math

Only one thing threatened to throw a parabolic curve in John Adams’ march to mathematics history: The desk and chairs in the London examination room were too high for the 9-year-old prodigy. Once properly seated by officials, Adams proceeded to make child’s play of hyperbolic functions and complex arithmetic problems, and finished the first of two test papers required for entrance to a British university 40 minutes early. At the end of the day, Adams, one of seven children of a math professor, had become the youngest person ever to pass the Associated Examining Board’s “A” level Pure Mathematics Exam. Adams beat the record of Ruth Lawrence, who took her math “A” level at 9 years, 10 months and went on to win a first-class honors degree from Oxford University at 13. Adams, who attended primary school at Leicestershire, England, said he also wants to go to Oxford, and to be a math professor.

--Police responding to an alarm tripped at a dog pound found not a cat burglar or dog-naper, but Nancy Maloney and her mutt munching on cheeseburgers and fries. Maloney had scaled the barbed wire at the pound in Windsor, Conn., to bring the late-night snack to her dog, which had been picked up roaming without a license. Maloney was arrested for trespassing and released on $150 bond, then returned to the pound to bail out her captive canine. Pound warden Linda Lupacchino said it is not unusual for people to come to bust out their pets--hence the security alarm. “Before we put the alarm in, we lost about three dogs a week,” she said. “People would cut the wire . . . . We actually had someone hitch a truck to the gate. They hitched a chain to the gate and drove away.”

--In a word, the Wyoming Supreme Court believes justice would be served if only Webster’s New World Dictionary would add the term conclusory to its pages. “After painstaking deliberation, we have decided that we like the word ‘conclusory,’ and we are distressed by its omission from the English language,” Justice Walter Urbigkit said in a footnote to an opinion in a medical malpractice lawsuit. The term, coined by Urbigkit’s law clerk, appears to be a combination of conclusion and illusory . “It means the message is not justified by supported facts, which it assumes but doesn’t state,” Urbigkit explained. To support his case, the Wyoming justice pointed to other examples of jargon, such as networking and feedback , that came into common use through efforts to communicate better. “We need to have more defined, clearly expressed communicative skills,” the justice ruled.