Background
Warren Weaver was born in Reedsburg, Wis. , the second of two sons of Isaiah Weaver, a pharmacist, and Kittie Belle Stupfell. After a somewhat lonely childhood in the then small town of Reedsburg, the family moved to Madison.
(Hamilton Matthews has a great life. His wife and kids ado...)
Hamilton Matthews has a great life. His wife and kids adore him, and his coworkers and friends respect him. However, they don't know what he and his three OSS buddies did during WWII. These four men share a secret, but they don't want to share the fortune behind it. Ham is pushing for repentance, but Patrick Evans, Horace Leadbeater, and Congressman Dwight O’Connell have other plans. When one of the four men is murdered in Kansas City, the best detective in the KCPD is assigned to the case. Lieutenant Grey Eagle will have to call upon his Cherokee instincts to unravel the toughest mystery of his career.
https://www.amazon.com/Tangled-Web-Warren-Weaver/dp/1481227467?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1481227467
Warren Weaver was born in Reedsburg, Wis. , the second of two sons of Isaiah Weaver, a pharmacist, and Kittie Belle Stupfell. After a somewhat lonely childhood in the then small town of Reedsburg, the family moved to Madison.
In Madison Warren graduated from high school in 1912. He attended the University of Wisconsin from 1912 to 1917, receiving a B. S. in mathematics in 1916 and a C. E. (Civil Engineer) degree in 1917.
Weaver's teaching career began at Throop College (later the California Institute of Technology) in Pasadena, Calif. , as an assistant professor of mathematics. After less than a year of teaching he was drafted into the United States Army and served in the newly formed National Research Council Unit. He worked mainly at the National Bureau of Standards, developing aviation equipment. In 1919, upon completion of his service in World War I as a second lieutenant, he returned to his teaching career in Pasadena. In the fall of 1920, Weaver joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin. The next twelve years at Madison comprised the rest of his academic career. His Ph. D. in 1921 was in mathematical physics, and his collaboration with Max Mason, a mathematical physicist who had been Weaver's most admired undergraduate professor, led to the publication of The Electromagnetic Field in 1929, for many years a widely used text for graduate students in physics. By 1928, Weaver was a full professor and chairman of the mathematics department. When Max Mason became president of the Rockefeller Foundation in New York City in 1930, he invited Weaver to join his staff. The newly reorganized foundation was shifting its focus of support into the area of natural sciences. Weaver's vision of research in biological fields, which included undertaking a long-range program to fund research in experimental and quantitative biology, met with approval, and he was invited to become director of the newly defined Division of Natural Sciences (renamed the Division of Natural Sciences and Agriculture in 1951 to reflect the expansion of interest in funding agricultural research) of the Rockefeller Foundation. The decision to leave Madison was not an easy one for the Weavers. In his 1970 autobiography Scene of Change: A Lifetime in American Science, Weaver wrote that although he loved to teach, he "lacked that strange and wonderful creative spark that makes a good researcher. " He accepted the opportunity in New York City, and in January of 1932 began a new career in science administration and philanthropy. The President's Review and Annual Report of the Rockefeller Foundation during Weaver's tenure there, as well as The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation (1952) by Raymond B. Fosdick, delineate the changes and refocusing of the Rockefeller Foundation under the leadership, enthusiasm, and vision of Warren Weaver. Weaver saw research in molecular biology as the dependable way to gain an understanding of life processes and to seek solutions to various health problems. Again in his 1970 book Scene of Change, he expressed the conviction that "the most important thing I have ever been able to do was to reorient the Rockefeller Foundation science programs. between 1932 and my retirement in 1959 the total of the grants made in the experimental biology program which I directed was roughly ninety million dollars. " Following his retirement from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1959, Weaver served as vice-president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, where he was praised upon his retirement in 1964 for uncommon imagination and integrity. The building at New York University that houses the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences is named Warren Weaver Hall. During World War II, Weaver served as chairman of the Fire Control Division (D-2) of the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, working on sighting systems and designing and developing a successful electrical antiaircraft gun director. In addition, remembering the devastation of such European libraries as those at Heidelberg, Louvain, and the Sorbonne, during World War I, Weaver, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Library Association, set up a program to give subscriptions of professional journals to these libraries. At the end of the war these journal collections were distributed. From 1943 to 1946 he served as chief of the Applied Mathematics Panel of the National Defense Research Committee, where his skills as an administrator and facilitator between the military and the Washington bureaucracy allowed him to coordinate effectively a group of research mathematicians at ten universities across the country. One of Warren Weaver's strongest continuing commitments was to the promotion of a broad public understanding of science. Toward the end of World War II he prepared a series of intermission programs sponsored by U. S. Rubber, each a talk given during breaks in the New York Philharmonic Symphony Society radio broadcasts by a research scientist who discussed his own work. These talks were assembled in a 1947 book entitled The Scientists Speak, edited and introduced by Weaver. Several years later Weaver put together a similar program for television, the Bell Telephone Science Series, eight programs that each focused on a particular field of science. After these programs were shown on national television, copies were distributed free of charge to schools, colleges, and churches. This commitment continued in his service to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), where he not only served as president in 1955, but became the first chairman of the AAAS Committee on the Public Understanding of Science and helped organize the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. In 1963, Weaver combined a special interest in the theory of probability and a penchant for presenting scientific information to the layperson in the writing of Lady Luck: The Theory of Probability. This popular book was reprinted in a slightly revised version in 1982. In 1965, for his many contributions to the public understanding of science, Weaver was awarded both UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for literary excellence in scientific writing, and the Arches of Science Award of the Pacific Science Center. Although his professional life was very demanding, Weaver's hobby of collecting materials about Alice in Wonderland and the Reverend Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) must not be overlooked. His collection, with special emphasis on foreign-language translations, includes over seven hundred items. In 1964, Weaver's book Alice in Many Tongues was published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Weaver died after a fall in New Milford, Connecticut.
(Hamilton Matthews has a great life. His wife and kids ado...)
On September 4, 1919, married his college classmate Mary Hemenway. They had two children.