Arthur Wynne - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Arthur Wynne's original crossword puzzle from December 21, 1913

Arthur Wynne - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Arthur Wynne (June 22, 1871 – January 14, 1945) was the British-born inventor of the modern crossword puzzle.

Arthur Wynne was born on June 22, 1871, in Liverpool, England. He emigrated to the United States on June 6, 1891, at the age of 19, settling for a time in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.


While in Pittsburgh, Wynne worked on the Pittsburgh Press newspaper. and played the violin in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. He later moved to New York City and worked on the New York World newspaper. He is best known for the invention of the crossword puzzle in 1913, when he was a resident of Cedar Grove, New Jersey.

Wynne created the page of puzzles for the "Fun" section of the Sunday edition of the New York World. For the December 21, 1913, edition, he introduced a puzzle with a diamond shape and a hollow center, the letters F-U-N already being filled in. He called it a "Word-Cross Puzzle."  A few weeks after the first "Word-Cross" appeared, the name of the puzzle was changed to "Cross-Word" as a result of a typesetting error. Wynne's puzzles have been known as "crosswords" ever since.

Arthur Wynne became a naturalized US citizen in the 1920s. He died in Clearwater, Florida, on January 14, 1945.

For the weekend beginning December 20, 2013, he was honored with an interactive Google Doodle commemorating the 100th anniversary of the first crossword puzzle.

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Was not going to include this topic celebrated with a google doodle until noticing the date Arthur Wynne died.

January 14th just happens to be my birthday...

January 14, 1962.

It reminded me of another historical figure sharing January 14th as the day of his death and how I happened to discover it.

How homoerotic I thought.

So I clicked on the link, reading what Wikipedia had to say about this one.

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His affiliation with the Institute for Advanced Study would last until his death in 1955.  He was one of the four first selected (two of the others being John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel) at the new Institute, where he soon developed a close friendship with Gödel. The two would take long walks together discussing their work.

Wikipedia: Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was also living at Princeton during this time. Gödel and Einstein subsequently developed a strong friendship, and were known to take long walks together to and from the Institute for Advanced Study. The nature of their conversations was a mystery to the other Institute members. Economist Oskar Morgenstern recounts that toward the end of his life Einstein confided that his "own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely...to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel".

Wikipedia: Kurt Godel

 Kurt Friedrich Gödel ( April 28, 1906 – January 14, 1978) was an Austrian, and later American, logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered with Aristotle and Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead and David Hilbert were pioneering the use of logic and set theory to understand the foundations of mathematics.

Gödel became a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1946. Around this time he stopped publishing, though he continued to work. He became a full professor at the Institute in 1953 and an emeritus professor in 1976.

In 1951, Gödel demonstrated the existence of paradoxical solutions to Albert Einstein's field equations in general relativity. He gave this elaboration to Einstein as a present for his 70th birthday. These "rotating universes" would allow time travel and caused Einstein to have doubts about his own theory. His solutions are known as the Gödel metric.

During his many years at the Institute, Gödel's interests turned to philosophy and physics. He studied and admired the works of Gottfried Leibniz, but came to believe that a hostile conspiracy had caused some of Leibniz's works to be suppressed. To a lesser extent he studied Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In the early 1970s, Gödel circulated among his friends an elaboration of Leibniz's version of Anselm of Canterbury's ontological proof of God's existence. This is now known as Gödel's ontological proof.

Gödel was awarded (with Julian Schwinger) the first Albert Einstein Award in 1951, and was also awarded the National Medal of Science, in 1974.

In later life, Gödel suffered periods of mental instability and illness. He had an obsessive fear of being poisoned; he would eat only food that his wife, Adele, prepared for him. Late in 1977, Adele was hospitalized for six months and could no longer prepare Gödel's food. In her absence, he refused to eat, eventually starving to death. He weighed 65 pounds (approximately 30 kg) when he died. His death certificate reported that he died of "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance" in Princeton Hospital on January 14, 1978.

Gödel was a convinced theist. He held the notion that God was personal, which differed from the religious views of his friend Albert Einstein.

He believed firmly in an afterlife, stating: "Of course this supposes that there are many relationships which today's science and received wisdom haven't any inkling of. But I am convinced of this [the afterlife], independently of any theology." It is "possible today to perceive, by pure reasoning" that it "is entirely consistent with known facts." "If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife]."

In an unmailed answer to a questionnaire, Gödel described his religion as "baptized Lutheran (but not member of any religious congregation). My belief is theistic, not pantheistic, following Leibniz rather than Spinoza."

Describing religion(s) in general, Gödel said: "Religions are, for the most part, bad--but religion is not".

He said about Islam: "I like Islam, it is consistent [or consequential] idea of religion and open-minded".