Rice, Elmer (1892–1967)

Born Elmer Reizenstein in New York City on September 28, 1892, Elmer Rice’s career spanned nearly fifty years. He wrote over fifty plays, including collaborations with Dorothy Parker (Close Harmony, 1924), Philip Barry (Cock Robin, 1928), and Langston Hughes and Kurt Weill (the musical adaptation of Street Scene, 1947), and explored a variety of dramatic forms. His professional theater debut came two years after graduation from New York Law School, with the enormously successfully On Trial (1914), a crime drama noted for its use of flashback. An antiwar play, The Iron Cross (1915), followed. Both works exemplify a career-long interest in inflecting the melodramatic form with new methods and in exploring the complexities of modern life. These inclinations are seen in The Adding Machine (1923) and Street Scene (1929). The former, a critique of the machine age, is a model of American expressionism; the latter advanced stage realism in the United States with a disorienting depiction of urban life. While these plays demonstrate an interest in new techniques, they are also rooted in melodrama and sought to promote liberal democratic social reform. Street Scene was awarded the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Family of Smale–Williams Solenoid Attractors as Solutions of Differential Equations: Exact Formula and Conjugacy

We show that the family of the Smale–Williams solenoid attractors parameterized by its contraction rate can be characterized as solutions of a set of differential equations. The exact formula describing the attractor can be obtained by solving the differential equations subject to explicitly given initial conditions. Using the formula, we present in this note a simple and explicit proof of the result that the dynamics on the solenoid is topologically conjugate to the shift on the inverse limit space of the expanding map t ↦ mt mod 1 for some integer m ≥ 2 and to a suspension over the adding machine.

AN ITERATED FUNCTION SYSTEM FOR THE CLOSURE OF THE ADDING MACHINE GROUP

In this paper, first we equip the automorphism group of the p-ary rooted tree X* with a natural metric and define a family of contractions on Aut(X*). Then, we construct an iterated function system (IFS) whose attractor is the closure of the adding machine group on Aut(X*). Finally, we show that this group is a strong self-similar group in the sense of IFS.

Remember the Adding Machine

This article illustrates research and development work in nanotechnology for manufacturing computers at the molecular level. Computers have gone from large and mechanical, like Babbage's Difference Engine, to molecular. Researchers have shown that carbon nanotubes can be strung across electrodes to make minute transistors. Beyond sheer density of data, the nanotube chips have another, perhaps even more important, potential advantage over their electronic rivals: the memory does not disappear when the power goes off. The tubes may be drawn to the electrode by an electrical attraction, but they are held there by van der Waals attraction, a sort of molecular-level suction. In that way, an electromechanical memory chip will have more in common with a computer hard drive or floppy disk than with random access memory. Physicist Paul McEuen and his colleagues at Cornell have fabricated a transistor that passes signals through a single atom.