Branches of Mathematics

Pure mathematics

• Algebra
• Calculus
• Geometry
• Topology
• Trignometry
• Combinatorics
• Logic
• Number theory

Applied mathematics

• Dynamical systems and differential equations
• Mathematical physics
• Computing
• Information theory and signal processing
• Probability and statistics
• Game theory
• Operations research

Related Topics

• Electromagnetic Spectrum
• Linear Equations
• Applied Physics
• Nano Technology
• Engineering Sciences
• Mathematical Medicine
• Fluid dynamics
• Computational Mathematics
• Gamma Ray Optics
• Onfrared Optics
• Relative Velocity
• Iciam
• Intelligent Imaging Neuroscience
• Biomedical Engineering
• Neuroscience Research
• Quantum Cosmology
• Brain Research

• Adam Kirsch
• Amherst College
• Antidepressant
• Booksmith
• Champaign, Illinois
• Christopher Meloni
• Chuck Palahniuk
• Clause
• Compassion
• Conjunctions
• Consider the Lobster
• Corey Stoll
• Cornell University
• Creative writing
• Cynthia Ozick
• Dave Eggers
• David Foster Wallace
• David Gates
• David Lipsky
• David Lynch
• Don DeLillo
• Donald Antrim
• Dustin Luke Nelson
• Emerson College
• English studies
• Esquire (magazine)
• Existentialism
• Fight Club (novel)
• Footnote
• George Saunders
• George W. Bush
• Gourmet (magazine)
• GQ (magazine)
• Guernica Magazine
• Harper's Magazine
• Harry Ransom Center
• Harvard University
• Hysterical realism
• Infinite Jest
• Infinite Summer
• Irony
• Ithaca, New York
• James D. Wallace
• John Irving
• John Krasinski
• John McCain
• Jonathan Franzen
• Josh Charles
• Julianne Nicholson
• Junior tennis
• Kenyon College
• Lev Grossman
• Literary fiction
• Los Angeles Times
• MacArthur Fellowship
• Manuel Puig
• Mary Karr
• Master of Fine Arts
• Mathematics
• Metamodernism
• Michiko Kakutani
• Mid-American Review
• Might magazine
• Modal logic
• Modernism modernity
• Neal Stephenson
• New York University
• Newsweek
• Nonfiction
• Novelist
• O. Henry Award
• Oblivion Stories
• Open City (magazine)
• Parkland College
• Phenelzine
• Playboy
• Pomona College
• PopMatters
• Portal Novels
• Premiere (magazine)
• Pulitzer Prize
• Rashida Jones
• Richard Powers
• Rolling Stone
• Roy E. Disney
• Salon Book Award
• Science (journal)
• September 11 attacks
• Short story
• Solipsism
• Stanley Elkin
• Summa cum laude
• TENNIS Magazine
• The Atlantic Monthly
• The Liars' Club
• The Monthly
• The New York Times
• The New Yorker
• The Pale King
• The Paris Review
• The Washington Post
• Thesis
• This Is Water
• Thomas Pynchon
• Timothy Hutton
• Tucson, Arizona
• Urbana, Illinois
• US Open (tennis)
• V.
• Waterstone's
• Wikipedia Persondata
• Will Forte
• William Gaddis
• William T. Vollmann
• Writer
• Zadie Smith
• 
  

• 
  Amherst College
  Amherst College is a private liberal arts college located in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. Amherst is an exclusively undergraduate four-year institution and enrolled 1,795 students in the fall of 2010. Students choose courses from 35 major programs in an unusually open curriculum.
  Founded in 1821 as an attempt to relocate Williams College by its President Zephaniah Swift Moore, Amherst is the third oldest institution of higher education in Massachusetts.^{[citation needed]} Amherst remained a men's college until becoming coeducational in 1975.
  Amherst has historically had close relationships and rivalries with Williams College and Wesleyan University which form the Little Three colleges. It is also a member of the Five College Consortium.
  Founded in 1821, Amherst College developed out of the secondary school Amherst Academy. The college was originally suggested as an alternative to Williams College, which was struggling to stay open. Although Williams remained open, Amherst was formed and diverged from its Williams roots into an individual institution.
  
  wn.com/Amherst_College
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  Booksmith
  Founded in October 1976, The Booksmith is an independent bookstore located in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. When first opened, the store was located at 1746 Haight Street, below the former I-Beam nightclub. In 1985, the store moved to its current location at 1644 Haight Street at Belvedere, about a block and a half from the intersection of Haight and Ashbury. Other neighborhood businesses include the Persian Aub Zam-Zam, Recycled Records, Amoeba Music, and Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream. Also located nearby is the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic.
  The Booksmith caters to neighborhood residents as well as tourists seeking the counter-cultural ambiance of Haight Street. The Booksmith is general interest shop, and is a member of both the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (NCIBA) and the American Booksellers Association (ABA).
  In June 2007, The Booksmith was sold by its founder Gary Frank to married couple Christin Evans and Praveen Madan. The original business was closed, and a new business, Haight Booksmith LLC, opened in its place. According to media reports at the time, the new owners plan to take the store in a different direction.
  
  wn.com/Booksmith
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  Cornell University
  Cornell University ( /kɔrˈnɛl/ kor-NEL) is a private Ivy League research university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell's motto, a popular 1865 Ezra Cornell quotation: "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study."
  The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its own admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar. Cornell is one of two private land grant universities, and its seven undergraduate colleges include three private, state-supported statutory or contract colleges. As a land grant college, it also operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York.
  
  wn.com/Cornell_University
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  Emerson College
  Emerson College is a private coeducational university located in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1880 by Charles Wesley Emerson as a "school of oratory," Emerson is "the only comprehensive college or university in America dedicated exclusively to communication and the arts in a liberal arts context." Offering over three dozen degree programs in the area of Arts and Communication, the college is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, Inc. Located in the Boston's Washington Street Theatre District on the edge of the Boston Common, the school also maintains buildings in Los Angeles and the town of Well, The Netherlands.
  Charles Wesley Emerson founded the Boston Conservatory of Elocution, Oratory, and Dramatic Art in 1880, a year after Boston University closed its School of Oratory.^{[citation needed]} Classes were held at Pemberton Square in Boston. Ten students enrolled in the conservatory's first class. The following year, the conservatory changed its name to the "Monroe Conservatory of Oratory," in honor of Charles Emerson's teacher at Boston University's School of Oratory, Professor Lewis B. Monroe. In 1890, the name changed again to "Emerson College of Oratory" and was later shortened to Emerson College in 1939.
  
  wn.com/Emerson_College
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  Harry Ransom Center
  The Harry Ransom Center is a library and archive at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in the collection of literary and cultural artifacts from the United States and Europe. The Ransom Center houses 36 million literary manuscripts, 1 million rare books, 5 million photographs, and more than 100,000 works of art. The Center has a reading room for scholars and galleries which display rotating exhibitions of works and objects from the collections.
  The two most prominent possessions in the Ransom Center's collections are a Gutenberg Bible (one of only 21 complete copies known to exist) and Nicéphore Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras, the first successful permanent photograph from nature. Both of these objects are on permanent display in the main lobby.
  Beyond these, the Center houses many culturally important documents and artifacts. Particular strengths include modern literature, performing arts, and photography. Some notable holdings include:
  Coordinates: 30°17′03″N 97°44′28″W / 30.2843°N 97.7412°W / 30.2843; -97.7412
  
  wn.com/Harry_Ransom_Center
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  Harvard University
  Harvard University is an American private Ivy League research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation (officially The President and Fellows of Harvard College) chartered in the country. Harvard's history, influence, and wealth have made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
  Harvard was named after its first benefactor, John Harvard. Although never formally affiliated with a church, the college primarily trained Congregationalist and Unitarian clergy. Harvard's curriculum and students became secular throughout the 18th century and by the 19th century had emerged as the central cultural establishment among Boston elites. Following the American Civil War, President Charles W. Eliot's forty year tenure (1869–1909) transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a centralized research university, and Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900.James Bryant Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II and began to reform the curriculum and liberalize admissions after the war. The undergraduate college became coeducational after its 1977 merger with Radcliffe College. Drew Gilpin Faust was elected the 28th president in 2007 and is the first woman to lead the university. Harvard has the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world, standing at $32 billion as of September 2011.
  
  wn.com/Harvard_University
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  Ithaca, New York
  The city of Ithaca is a city in upstate New York and the county seat of Tompkins County, as well as the largest community in the Ithaca-Tompkins County metropolitan area (which also contains the separate municipalities of the town of Ithaca, the village of Cayuga Heights, the village of Lansing and other towns and villages in Tompkins County). The city of Ithaca sits on the southern shore of Cayuga Lake, in Central New York. It is named for the Greek island of Ithaca.
  Ithaca is best known for being home to Cornell University, an Ivy League school of over 20,000 students (most of whom study on Cornell’s Ithaca campus).Ithaca College is located just south of the city in the town of Ithaca, adding to Ithaca’s "college town" focus and atmosphere. Nearby is Tompkins Cortland Community College (TC3). These three colleges influence Ithaca's seasonal population. In 2010, the city's population was 30,014, and the metropolitan area had a population of 101,564.
  Namgyal Monastery in Ithaca is the North American seat of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama.
  
  wn.com/Ithaca,_New_York
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  New York University
  Coordinates: 40°43′48″N 73°59′42″W / 40.73°N 73.995°W / 40.73; -73.995
  New York University (NYU) is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City, USA. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. Founded in 1831, NYU is one of the largest private nonprofit institutions of American higher education.
  NYU was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1950. The university counts 34 Nobel Prize winners, 3 Abel Prize winners, 10 National Medal of Science recipients, 16 Pulitzer Prize winners, 21 Academy Award winners, and Emmy,Grammy, and Tony Award winners among its faculty and alumni. NYU also has MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowship holders as well as National Academy of Sciences members among its past and present graduates and faculty.
  NYU is organized into 18 schools, colleges, and institutes, located in six centers throughout Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn, as well as more than a dozen other sites across the world, with plans for further expansion.
  
  wn.com/New_York_University
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  Pomona College
  Pomona College is a private, residential, liberal arts college in Claremont, California. Founded in 1887 in Pomona, California by a group of Congregationalists, the college moved to Claremont in 1889 to the site of a hotel, retaining its name. The school enrolls 1,548 students.
  The founding member of the Claremont Colleges, Pomona is a non-sectarian, coeducational school. Its founders strove to create "a college of the New England type". In order to reach this goal, the board of trustees included graduates of Williams, Dartmouth, Colby and Yale. Since 1925, the Claremont Colleges, which have grown to include five undergraduate and two graduate institutions, have provided Pomona's student body with the resources of a larger university while preserving the closeness of a small college. Pomona is currently ranked 4th in National Liberal Arts Colleges by U.S. News & World Report and is the 9th most selective private university in the United States.
  Pomona College was established as a coeducational institution on October 14, 1887. The group’s goal was to create a college in the same mold as small New England institutions. The College was originally formed in Pomona; classes first began in a rental house on September 12, 1888. The next year, the school moved to Claremont, at the site of an unfinished hotel. The project was deferred following the suicide of Gwendolyn Rose, who died in the basement during construction. This building would eventually become Sumner Hall, current location of the Admissions and the Office of Campus Life. The name – Pomona College – remained after the relocation. The College’s first graduating class had ten members in 1894.
  
  wn.com/Pomona_College
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  Tucson, Arizona
  Tucson ( /ˈtuːsɒn/ TOO-son) is the county seat of Pima County, Arizona, United States, and is the home to University of Arizona. The 2010 United States Census puts the city's population at 520,116, while the 2011 estimated population of the entire Tucson metropolitan area was 989,569. Tucson is the second-largest populated city in Arizona behind Phoenix, which both anchor the Arizona Sun Corridor. The city is located 118 miles (188 km) southeast of Phoenix and 60 miles (98 km) north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Tucson is the 32nd largest city and 52nd largest metropolitan area in the United States. Roughly 150 Tucson companies are involved in the design and manufacture of optics and optoelectronics systems, earning Tucson the nickname Optics Valley.
  Major incorporated suburbs of Tucson include Oro Valley and Marana northwest of the city, Sahuarita south of the city, and South Tucson in an enclave south of downtown. Communities in the vicinity of Tucson (some within or overlapping the city limits) include Casas Adobes, Catalina Foothills, Flowing Wells, Tanque Verde, Tortilita, New Pascua, Sahuarita and Vail. Towns outside the Tucson metro area include Benson to the southeast, Catalina and Oracle to the north, and Green Valley to the south.
  
  wn.com/Tucson,_Arizona
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  US Open (tennis)
  The US Open Championship, formally the United States Open Tennis Championships, is a hardcourt tennis tournament which is the modern iteration of one of the oldest tennis championships in the world, the U.S. National Championship, which for men's singles was first contested in 1881. Since 1987, the US Open has been chronologically the fourth and final tennis major comprising the Grand Slam each year; the other three are the Australian Open, French Open and Wimbledon. It is held annually in August and September over a two-week period (the weeks before and after Labor Day weekend). The main tournament consists of five different event championships: men's and women's singles, men's and women's doubles, and mixed doubles, with additional tournaments for senior, junior, and wheelchair players. Since 1978, the tournament has been played on acrylic hard courts at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, New York City.
  The US Open has tiebreaks in every set, including the last set. The other three Grand Slam tournaments have tiebreaks in every set other than the last set (i.e. the fifth set for men and third set for women), and therefore their last set continues indefinitely until a two-game lead is reached.
  
  wn.com/US_Open_(tennis)

• Adam Kirsch
  Adam Kirsch is an American poet and literary critic.
  Kirsch is the son of lawyer, author, and biblical scholar Jonathan Kirsch, and a 1997 graduate of Harvard College.
  Kirsch was the book critic for the New York Sun until it ceased publishing in 2008. He was previously the assistant literary editor for The New Republic, “no small achievement for a writer in his 20s.” He is also the author of the weekly column "The Reader" on Nextbook. Richard John Neuhaus writing in First Things called Kirsch “a literary critic of some distinction.” Writing in The Nation, John Palattella describes Kirsch as “the intellectual offspring of the New Formalists, a small group of poets and critics—among them Brad Leithauser, Timothy Steele and Dana Gioia (head of the National Endowment for the Arts)—whose essays and poems in defense of traditional formal conventions were championed by The New Criterion during the 1980s.” He writes regularly for Slate , The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, and other magazines. Kirsch is a contributing editor to Harvard Magazine.
  
  wn.com/Adam_Kirsch
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  Christopher Meloni
  Christopher Peter Meloni is an American actor. He is best known for his television roles as NYPD Detective Elliot Stabler on the NBC police drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and as inmate Chris Keller on the HBO prison drama Oz.
  Meloni was born the youngest of three children in Washington, D.C., the son of Cecile, a homemaker, and Dr. Charles R Meloni, an endocrinologist. His maternal ancestry is French Canadian and his paternal ancestry is Sardinian (Italy). Meloni is a typical and widely diffused Sardinian surname. He attended St. Stephen's School (now St. Stephen's & St. Agnes School) and the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he first studied acting, graduating with a degree in history in 1983. After graduation, Meloni went to New York where he continued his studies with Sanford Meisner at the famed Neighborhood Playhouse, as well as the Center for the Media Arts.
  Meloni worked as a construction worker prior to getting his acting break. He has also worked as a bouncer, bartender, and personal trainer. Meloni worked his way up the acting ladder with commercials, short-lived TV series, and bit parts in a number of films. His first noticeable role was as the hotheaded son of a Mafia Don in the 1996 thriller Bound. He also appeared as Robbie Sinclair's friend Spike in Dinosaurs and Julia Roberts' fiance in Runaway Bride.
  
  wn.com/Christopher_Meloni
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  Chuck Palahniuk
  Charles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk ( /ˈpɔːlənɪk/; born February 21, 1962) is an American transgressional fiction novelist and freelance journalist. He is best known for the award-winning novel Fight Club, which was later made into a feature film. He maintains homes in the states of Oregon and Washington.
  Palahniuk was born in Pasco, Washington, the son of Carol and Fred Palahniuk, and grew up living in a mobile home in nearby Burbank, Washington with his family. His parents separated when he was 14 and subsequently divorced, often leaving him and his three siblings to live with their maternal grandparents at their cattle ranch in Eastern Washington. His paternal grandfather was Ukrainian and immigrated to New York from Canada in 1907. Palahniuk's father began a relationship with another woman; her ex-boyfriend murdered the couple. Palahniuk's mother died of cancer.
  In his twenties, Palahniuk attended the University of Oregon's School of Journalism, graduating in 1986. While attending college he worked as an intern for National Public Radio member station KLCC in Eugene, Oregon. He moved to Portland soon afterwards. After writing for the local newspaper for a short while, he began working for Freightliner as a diesel mechanic, continuing in that job until his writing career took off. During that time, he also wrote manuals on fixing trucks and had a stint as a journalist (a job he did not return to until after he became a successful novelist). After casually attending a free, introductory seminar held by an organization called Landmark Education, Palahniuk quit his job as a journalist in 1988. Palahniuk performed volunteer work for a homeless shelter; later, he also volunteered at a hospice as an escort; he provided transportation for terminally ill people and brought them to support group meetings. He ceased volunteering upon the death of a patient to whom he had grown attached.
  
  wn.com/Chuck_Palahniuk
• Corey Stoll
  Corey Daniel Stoll (born March 14, 1976) is an American stage and screen actor. He received a Drama Desk Award nomination as Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play for Intimate Apparel, opposite Tony winner and Oscar nominee Viola Davis.
  Stoll was born on the Upper West Side of New York City, New York. He was raised Jewish. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1998, and from New York University's Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts in 2003. He studied drama at Long Lake Camp For The Arts from 1988 through 1992.
  He has appeared in several films, including North Country, Lucky Number Slevin, the TV movie A Girl Like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Push. In 2010, he appeared in Helena from the Wedding and Salt. He also had a guest appearance on the "Sacrifice" episode of Numb3rs.
  Stoll starred as LAPD Detective Tomas "TJ" Jaruszalski on the NBC police drama Law & Order: LA.
  Stoll played Ernest Hemingway in Woody Allen's 2011 film Midnight in Paris. Stoll, who is mostly bald, wore a custom wig for the role.
  
  wn.com/Corey_Stoll
• Cynthia Ozick
  Cynthia Ozick (born April 17, 1928) is an American-Jewish short story writer, novelist, and essayist.
  Cynthia Shoshana Ozick was born in New York City, the second of two children. She moved to the Bronx with her Russian-born parents, Celia (Regelson) and William Ozick, proprietors of the Park View Pharmacy in the Pelham Bay neighborhood. As a girl, Ozick helped to deliver prescriptions. In Ozick's biography Growing up in the Bronx, she remembers stones thrown at her and being called a Christ-killer as she ran past the two churches in her neighborhood. In school she was publicly shamed for refusing to sing Christmas carols. She attended Hunter College High School in Manhattan. She earned her B.A. from New York University and went on to study English Literature at Ohio State University, where she completed an M.A. Ozick is married to Bernard Hallote, a lawyer, with whom she has a daughter. She is the niece of the Hebraist Abraham Regelson.
  Ozick's fiction and essays are often about Jewish American life, but she also writes on a broad range of topics including politics, history, and literary criticism. In addition, she has written and translated poetry.
  
  wn.com/Cynthia_Ozick
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  Dave Eggers
  Dave Eggers (born March 12, 1970) is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is known for the best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and for his more recent work as a screenwriter. He is also the co-founder of the literacy project 826 Valencia.
  Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, one of four siblings. His father was John K. Eggers (1936–1991), an attorney. His mother, Heidi McSweeney Eggers (1940–1992), was a school teacher. When Eggers was still a child, the family moved to the upscale suburb of Lake Forest, near Chicago. He attended high school there and was a classmate of the actor Vince Vaughn. Eggers attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, intending to get a degree in journalism, but his studies were interrupted by the deaths of both of his parents in 1991-1992 — his father in 1991 from brain and lung cancer, and his mother in January 1992 from stomach cancer. Both were in their 50s.
  These events were chronicled in his first book, the lightly fictionalized A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. At the time, Eggers was 21, and his younger brother, Christopher ("Toph"), was 8 years old. The two eldest siblings, Bill and Beth, were unable to commit to care for Toph; his older brother had a full-time job and his sister was enrolled in law school. As a result, Dave Eggers took the responsibility. He left the University of Illinois and moved to Berkeley, California, with his girlfriend Kirsten and his brother. They initially moved in with Eggers's sister, Beth, and her roommate, but eventually found a place in another part of town, which they paid for with money left to them by their parents. Toph attended a small private school, and Eggers did temp work and freelance graphic design for a local newspaper. Eventually, with his friend David Moodie, he took over a local free newspaper called Cups. This gradually evolved into the satirical magazine Might.
  
  wn.com/Dave_Eggers
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  David Foster Wallace
  David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an award-winning American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He was widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest. In 2005, Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.
  Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years." Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011, and in 2012 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A biography of Wallace by D. T. Max, titled Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, will be published in September 2012.
  Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, to James Donald Wallace and Sally Foster Wallace. In his early childhood, Wallace lived in Champaign, Illinois. In fourth grade, he moved to Urbana and attended Yankee Ridge school and Urbana High School. As an adolescent, Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player.
  
  wn.com/David_Foster_Wallace
• David Lipsky
  David Lipsky (born 20 July 1965) is an American author. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1983 and Brown University in 1987, and holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University. Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone Magazine. He received a National Magazine Award for writing about David Foster Wallace in 2009. He currently lives in New York City.
  David Lipsky was born in New York City, and is the son of the painter Pat Lipsky. David graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1983. He graduated magna cum laude from Brown University, studying with the writer John Hawkes. He received his M.A. from Johns Hopkins University, where he studied with the novelist John Barth. Lipsky currently teaches creative writing at the M.F.A. program at New York University.
  As an undergraduate, Lipsky published his story "Three Thousand Dollars" in the New Yorker magazine; it was selected by Raymond Carver as one of the Best American Short Stories of 1986. Carver was surprised by the author's youth, noting in his introduction, "I confess to not having read David Lipsky before this. Have I been asleep and missed some stories of his, or maybe even a novel or two? I don't know. I do know I intend to pay attention from now on."
  
  wn.com/David_Lipsky
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  David Lynch
  David Keith Lynch (born January 20, 1946) is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, comic book artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery, and meticulous sound design. The surreal, and in many cases violent, elements to his films have earned them the reputation that they "disturb, offend or mystify" their audiences.
  Born to a middle class family in Missoula, Montana, Lynch spent his childhood traveling around the United States, before going on to study painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he first made the transition to producing short films. Deciding to devote himself more fully to this medium, he moved to Los Angeles, where he produced his first motion picture, the surrealist horror Eraserhead (1977). After Eraserhead became a cult classic on the midnight movie circuit, Lynch was employed to direct The Elephant Man (1980), from which he gained mainstream success. Then being employed by the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, he proceeded to make two films: the science-fiction epic Dune (1984), which proved to be a critical and commercial failure, and then a neo-noir crime film, Blue Velvet (1986), which was highly critically acclaimed.
  
  wn.com/David_Lynch
• Don DeLillo
  Don DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an award-winning American author, playwright, and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, and global terrorism. He currently lives near New York City in the suburb of Bronxville.
  DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936 and grew up in a working-class Italian Catholic family in an Italian-American neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City, not far from Arthur Avenue. Reflecting on his childhood in The Bronx, DeLillo later described how he was "...always out in the street. As a little boy I whiled away most of my time pretending to be a baseball announcer on the radio. I could think up games for hours at a time. There were eleven of us in a small house, but the close quarters were never a problem. I didn't know things any other way. We always spoke English and Italian all mixed up together. My grandmother, who lived in America for fifty years, never learned English."
  
  wn.com/Don_DeLillo
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  George Saunders
  George Saunders (born December 2, 1958) is a New York Times bestselling American writer of short stories, essays, novellas and children's books. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's and GQ, among other publications. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to the weekend magazine of The Guardian’s Saturday edition until October, 2008.
  A professor at Syracuse University, Saunders won the National Magazine Award for fiction in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2004, and second prize in the O. Henry Awards in 1997. His first story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award. In 2006 Saunders received a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2007 he won the World Fantasy Award for his short story "CommComm". His story collection In Persuasion Nation was a finalist for The Story Prize in 2007.
  Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas, and grew up on the south side of Chicago. He is a graduate of Oak Forest High School in Oak Forest, Illinois, a southern suburb of Chicago. In 1981 Saunders received a B.S. in geophysical engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. Speaking of his scientific background, Saunders said "...any claim I might make to originality in my fiction is really just the result of this odd background: basically, just me working inefficiently, with flawed tools, in a mode I don't have sufficient background to really understand. Like if you put a welder to designing dresses." In 1988, he obtained an M.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University.
  
  wn.com/George_Saunders
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  George W. Bush
  George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician and businessman who was the 43rd President of the United States from 2001 to 2009 and the 46th Governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000. The eldest son of Barbara Bush and George H. W. Bush, he was born in New Haven, Connecticut. After graduating from Yale University in 1968 and Harvard Business School in 1975, Bush worked in oil businesses. He married Laura Welch in 1977 and ran unsuccessfully for the House of Representatives shortly thereafter. He later co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team before defeating Ann Richards in the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election. In a close and controversial election, Bush was elected President in 2000 as the Republican candidate, defeating Vice President Al Gore in the Electoral College. Bush is the second American president to have been the son of a former president. He is also the brother of Jeb Bush, former Governor of Florida.
  Terrorist attacks occurred eight months into Bush's first term as president on September 11, 2001. In response, Bush announced the War on Terror, an international military campaign which included the war in Afghanistan launched in 2001 and the war in Iraq launched in 2003. In addition to national security issues, Bush promoted policies on the economy, health care, education, and social security reform. He signed into law broad tax cuts, the PATRIOT Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, and Medicare prescription drug benefits for seniors. His tenure saw national debates on immigration, Social Security, electronic surveillance, and enhanced interrogation techniques. His administration also withdrew the U.S. from a some international treaty processes, including the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
  
  wn.com/George_W._Bush
• James D. Wallace
  James Donald Wallace is Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the author of several books on the subject of morality and ethics that draw on the American Philosophical tradition of Pragmatism, in particular the ethical theory of John Dewey. His works include Norms and Practices (2008),Ethical Norms, Particular Cases (1996),Moral Relevance and Moral Conflict (1988), and Virtues and Vices (1978), as well as numerous articles. His teaching has covered a variety of subjects including: "value theory, practical reasoning, social and political philosophy, bioethics, ancient Greek philosophy, and philosophy of art." Wallace is the father of the late American novelist and philosopher David Foster Wallace.
  Wallace graduated with a BA from Amherst College in 1959 and a PhD from Cornell University in 1963.
  
  wn.com/James_D._Wallace
• 
  John Irving
  John Winslow Irving (born John Wallace Blunt, Jr.; March 2, 1942) is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.
  Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978. Some of Irving's novels, such as The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, have been bestsellers. Five of his novels have been adapted to film. Several of Irving's books (Garp, Meany, A Widow for One Year) and short stories have been set in and around Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1999 for his script The Cider House Rules.
  Irving was born John Wallace Blunt, Jr. in Exeter, New Hampshire, the son of Helen Frances (née Winslow) and John Wallace Blunt, Sr., a writer and executive recruiter. Irving grew up in Exeter, as the stepson of an Exeter faculty member, Colin F.N. Irving (1941), and nephew of another, H. Hamilton "Hammy" Bissell (1929). Irving was in the Exeter wrestling program both as a student athlete and as an assistant coach, and wrestling features prominently in his books, stories and life. Irving's biological father, whom he never met, had been a pilot in the Army Air Forces and during World War II was shot down over Burma in July 1943, but survived (an incident incorporated into the novel The Cider House Rules). Irving did not find out about his father's heroism until 1981.
  
  wn.com/John_Irving
• 
  John McCain
  John Sidney McCain III (born August 29, 1936) is the senior United States Senator from Arizona. He was the Republican presidential nominee in the 2008 United States election.
  McCain followed his father and grandfather, both four-star admirals, into the United States Navy, graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1958. He became a naval aviator, flying ground-attack aircraft from aircraft carriers. During the Vietnam War, he was almost killed in the 1967 USS Forrestal fire. In October 1967, while on a bombing mission over Hanoi, he was shot down, seriously injured, and captured by the North Vietnamese. He was a prisoner of war until 1973. McCain experienced episodes of torture, and refused an out-of-sequence early repatriation offer. His war wounds left him with lifelong physical limitations.
  He retired from the Navy as a captain in 1981 and moved to Arizona, where he entered politics. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1982, he served two terms, and was then elected to the U.S. Senate in 1986, winning re-election easily four times, most recently in 2010. While generally adhering to conservative principles, McCain at times has had a media reputation as a "maverick" for his willingness to disagree with his party on certain issues. After being investigated and largely exonerated in a political influence scandal of the 1980s as a member of the Keating Five, he made campaign finance reform one of his signature concerns, which eventually led to the passage of the McCain-Feingold Act in 2002. He is also known for his work towards restoring diplomatic relations with Vietnam in the 1990s, and for his belief that the war in Iraq should be fought to a successful conclusion. McCain has chaired the Senate Commerce Committee, opposed spending that he considered to be pork barrel, and played a key role in alleviating a crisis over judicial nominations.
  
  wn.com/John_McCain
• Josh Charles
  Joshua Aaron "Josh" Charles (born September 15, 1971) is an American stage, film and television actor. He is best known for the roles of Daniel "Dan" Rydell on Sports Night, Will Gardner on The Good Wife, and his early work as Knox Overstreet in Dead Poets Society.
  Charles was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Laura, a gossip columnist for The Baltimore Sun newspaper, and Allan Charles, an advertising executive. He began his career performing stand-up comedy at the age of nine. As a teenager, he spent several summers at Stagedoor Manor Performing Arts Center in New York, and attended the Baltimore School for the Arts. Charles is a fan of the Baltimore Orioles (baseball), Baltimore Ravens (American football) and Tottenham (soccer) teams.
  Charles's film debut was in fellow Baltimore native John Waters's Hairspray in 1988. The following year, he starred alongside Robin Williams and Ethan Hawke in the Oscar-winning Dead Poets Society. Subsequent film roles have included Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, Threesome, Pie in the Sky, Muppets from Space, S.W.A.T, Four Brothers, After.Life, Crossing The Bridge, and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.
  
  wn.com/Josh_Charles
• 
  Manuel Puig
  Manuel Puig (born Juan Manuel Puig Delledonne) (General Villegas, Argentina, December 28, 1932 - Cuernavaca, Mexico, July 22, 1990) was an Argentine author. Among his best known novels are La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968) (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), Boquitas pintadas (1969) (Heartbreak Tango), and El beso de la mujer araña (1976) (Kiss of the Spider Woman), which was made into a film by the Argentine-Brazilian director, Héctor Babenco and in 1993 into a Broadway musical.
  Manuel Puig was born in General Villegas (in Buenos Aires province). After unsuccessfully studying architecture in the Universidad de Buenos Aires, he began working as a film archivist and editor in the city of Buenos Aires and later, in Italy after winning a scholarship from the Italian Institute of Buenos Aires. Puig's dream was to become a screenwriter to write TV shows and movies. His career as a screenwriter never took off, however. In the 1960s, he moved back to Buenos Aires, where he penned his first major novel, La traición de Rita Hayworth. Because he had leftist political tendencies and also foresaw a rightist wave in Argentina, Puig moved to Mexico in 1973, where he wrote his later works (including El beso de la mujer araña).
  
  wn.com/Manuel_Puig
• Mary Karr
  Mary Karr (born January 16, 1955 in Groves, Texas) is an American poet, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.
  Her memoir The Liars' Club, published in 1995, was a New York Times bestseller for over a year, and was named one of the year's best books. It delves vividly and often humorously into her deeply troubled childhood, most of which was spent in a gritty industrial section of Southeast Texas in the 1960s. She was encouraged to write her personal history by her friend Tobias Wolff, but has said she only took up the project when her marriage fell apart.
  She followed the book with another memoir, Cherry (2000), about her late adolescence and early womanhood.
  A third memoir, Lit: A Memoir, which she says details "my journey from blackbelt sinner and lifelong agnostic to unlikely Catholic," came out in November 2009. She writes about her time as an alcoholic and the salvation she found in her conversion to Catholicism.
  
  wn.com/Mary_Karr
• 
  Neal Stephenson
  Neal Town Stephenson (born October 31, 1959) is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction.
  Difficult to categorize, his novels have been variously referred to as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, and postcyberpunk. Other labels such as 'baroque' often appear.
  Stephenson explores areas such as mathematics, cryptography, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. He also writes non-fiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired.
  He has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (funded by Jeff Bezos) developing a manned sub-orbital launch system, and is also cofounder of Subutai Corporation, whose first offering is the interactive fiction project The Mongoliad. He has also written novels with his uncle, George Jewsbury ("J. Frederick George"), under the collective pseudonym Stephen Bury.
  Born on October 31, 1959 in Fort Meade, Maryland, Stephenson came from a family of engineers and hard scientists; his father is a professor of electrical engineering whose father was a physics professor; his mother worked in a biochemistry laboratory, while her father was a biochemistry professor. Stephenson's family moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in 1960 and then in 1966 to Ames, Iowa, where he graduated from Ames High School in 1977. Stephenson studied at Boston University, first specializing in physics, then switching to geography after he found that it would allow him to spend more time on the university mainframe. He graduated in 1981 with a B.A. in geography and a minor in physics. Since 1984, Stephenson has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest and currently resides in Seattle with his family.
  
  wn.com/Neal_Stephenson
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  Rashida Jones
  Rashida Leah Jones (born February 25, 1976) is an American film and television actress, comic book author, screenwriter and occasional singer. She played Louisa Fenn on Boston Public and Karen Filippelli on The Office as well as roles in the films I Love You, Man, Our Idiot Brother, The Social Network and The Muppets. As of 2009^[update], Jones stars on the NBC comedy series Parks and Recreation as Ann Perkins.
  Jones was born in Los Angeles, the younger daughter of media mogul, producer and musician Quincy Jones and actress Peggy Lipton. She has an older sister, Kidada Jones, and five half-siblings by her father's other relationships. Her father is of mostly black American, as well as European, ancestry, and is from a Christian family. Her mother is Ashkenazi Jewish (a descendant of immigrants from Russia and Latvia via Ireland), and Rashida Jones attended Hebrew school. She was raised in Bel Air, Los Angeles, California.
  In his autobiography, Jones's father recalled how he would often find his six-year-old daughter under the covers after bedtime with a flashlight reading five books at a time. Jones also displayed musical ability from a young age and can play classical piano. Her mother told Entertainment Tonight that Jones is "also a fabulous singer and songwriter, so she has inherited it (from Quincy), there's no question about it. Her dad's teaching her how to orchestrate and arrange too."
  
  wn.com/Rashida_Jones
• Stanley Elkin
  Stanley Lawrence Elkin (May 11, 1930 – May 31, 1995) was an American Jewish novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His extravagant, satirical fiction revolves around American consumerism, popular culture, and male-female relationships.
  Elkin was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Chicago from age three onwards. He did both his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, receiving a bachelor's degree in English in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1961 for his dissertation on William Faulkner. (During this period he was drafted and served in the U.S. Army from 1955-57.) In 1953 Elkin married Joan Marion Jacobson. He was a member of the English faculty at Washington University in St. Louis from 1960 until his death, and battled multiple sclerosis for most of his adult life. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
  During his career, Elkin published ten novels, two volumes of novellas, two books of short stories, a collection of essays, and one (unproduced) screenplay. Elkin's work revolves about American pop culture, which it portrays in innumerable darkly comic variations. Characters and especially prose style take full precedence over plot. His language is extravagant and exuberant, baroque and flowery, taking fantastic flight from his characters' endless patter. "He was like a jazz artist who would go off on riffs," said critic William Gass. In a review of George Mills, Ralph B. Sipper wrote, "Elkin's trademark is to tightrope his way from comedy to tragedy with hardly a slip." About the influence of ethnicity on his work Elkin said he admired most "the writers who are stylists, Jewish or not. Bellow is a stylist, and he is Jewish. William Gass is a stylist, and he is not Jewish. What I go for in my work is language."
  
  wn.com/Stanley_Elkin
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  Thomas Pynchon
  Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist. He is a MacArthur Fellow noted for his dense and complex novels, and both his fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles and themes, including (but not limited to) the fields of history, science, and mathematics. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
  Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and Mason & Dixon (1997). Pynchon is also known for being very private; very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s.
  
  wn.com/Thomas_Pynchon
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  Will Forte
  Orville Willis Forte IV, better known as Will Forte (born June 17, 1970), is an American actor, voice actor, comedian and writer best known as a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 2002–2010 and for starring in the SNL spin-off film MacGruber, as well as for the role of Paul L'Astnamé, Jenna Maroney's cross-dressing boyfriend, on NBC's 30 Rock.
  Forte was born in Alameda County, California, the son of Patricia C. (née Stivers) and Orville Willis Forte III. He was raised in Lafayette, California, and graduated from Acalanes High School and UCLA with a history degree. While at UCLA, he was a member of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity.
  Forte joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 2002 as a featured player. He was upgraded to full cast member the next season. Forte took over the role of then-president George W. Bush following the departure of Will Ferrell, a season with Chris Parnell in the role, and a brief half-season of Darrell Hammond playing the part. Forte featured as a number of recurring characters over the years, including The Falconer, MacGruber, Tim Calhoun, Mr. Dillon in the Gilly sketches, Greg Stink, and as one of the characters in the Song Memories sketches. Forte was often featured as a guest at the Weekend Update desk. He had several recurring Update characters, such as Tim Calhoun; He often appeared in musical Update bits, such as one of The Kelly Brothers, Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates, and a member of reverse Bon Jovi band, Jon Bovi. On August 26, 2010, Forte announced that he would be leaving SNL after eight years on the show (2002–2010) to focus on other projects. On April 2, 2011 & May 12, 2012, he made a guest appearance on the show, reprising his role of Greg Stink.
  
  wn.com/Will_Forte
• William Gaddis
  William Thomas Gaddis, Jr. (December 29, 1922 – December 16, 1998) was an American novelist. The first and longest of his five novels, The Recognitions, was named one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005 and two others won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. A collection of his essays was published posthumously as The Rush for Second Place (2002).
  Gaddis is one of the first and most important American postmodern writers. Because of their complexity and inventiveness in structure and style, his novels are often challenging to read; for example, his National Book Award winners J R and A Frolic of His Own are written almost entirely in dialogue form and without much description, which sometimes confuses which character is speaking. His books are also known for their extensive use of literary and cultural allusions, some of which are annotated in the The Gaddis Annotations.
  Gaddis was born in New York City to William Thomas Gaddis, who worked "on Wall Street and in politics", and Edith Gaddis, an executive for the New York Steam Corporation. When he was 3, his parents separated and Gaddis was subsequently raised by his mother in Massapequa, Long Island. At age 5 he was sent to Merricourt Boarding School in Berlin, Connecticut. He continued in private school until the eighth grade, after which he returned to Long Island to receive his diploma at Farmingdale High School in 1941. He entered Harvard in 1941 and famously wrote for the Harvard Lampoon (where he eventually served as President), but was asked to leave in 1944, supposedly because of a drunken brawl, though the circumstances are unclear.^{[citation needed]} He worked as a fact checker for The New Yorker for little over a year (late February 1945 until late April 1946), then spent five years traveling in Mexico, Central America, Spain, France, England, and North Africa, returning to the United States in 1951.
  
  wn.com/William_Gaddis
• William T. Vollmann
  William Tanner Vollmann (born July 28, 1959 in Los Angeles, California) is an American novelist, journalist, short story writer, and essayist. For the novel Europe Central he won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction. He lives in Sacramento, California, with his wife and daughter.
  Vollmann studied at Deep Springs College, then earned a B.A., summa cum laude, in comparative literature at Cornell University.
  In his youth, Vollmann's younger sister drowned while under his supervision, a tragedy for which he felt responsible. This experience, according to him, influences much of his work.
  After graduation, Vollmann went on to the University of California, Berkeley, on a fellowship for a doctoral program in Comparative Literature. He dropped out after one year with the intention of engaging in life instead of just studying. He worked odd jobs, including as a secretary at an insurance company, and saved up enough money to go to Afghanistan in 1982. His experiences traveling with the mujahideen formed the basis of his first non-fiction book An Afghanistan Picture Show, or, How I Saved the World which was not published until 1992. Upon his return to the USA he worked as a computer programmer, despite having virtually no experience with computers. According to a New York Times Magazine profile by novelist Madison Smartt Bell, he spent the better part of a year there writing his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels, after hours on office computers, subsisting on candy bars from vending machines and hiding from the janitorial staff.
  
  wn.com/William_T._Vollmann
• 
  Zadie Smith
  Zadie Smith (born on 25 October 1975) is a British novelist. To date she has written three novels. In 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors. She joined New York University's Creative Writing Program as a tenured professor on September 1, 2010.
  Zadie Smith was born as Sadie Smith in the northwest London borough of Brent – a largely working-class area – to a Jamaican mother, Yvonne Bailey, and a British father, Harvey Smith. Her mother had grown up in Jamaica and emigrated to Britain in 1969. Their marriage was her father's second. Zadie has a half-sister, a half-brother, and two younger brothers, one of whom is the rapper and stand-up comedian Doc Brown and the other is rapper Luc Skyz. As a child she was fond of tap dancing; as a teenager she considered a career as an actress in musical theatre; and as a university student she earned money as a jazz singer and wanted to become a journalist.
  Her parents divorced when she was a teenager. When she was 14, she changed her name to "Zadie". Despite earlier ambitions, literature emerged as her principal interest and would provide a model for her future career.
  
  wn.com/Zadie_Smith

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