Lawrence P. Lessing is an American science writer.
A native of Buffalo, New York, he started his career as a newspaper man in Pittsburgh. There he was a correspondent for Time magazine. He was a long-time member of the board of editors of Fortune magazine, where he contributed articles on electronics, jet propulsion, automation, metallurgy.
From 1953 to 1955, he was an editor and contributor to Scientific American . Lessing won the 1965 AAAS-Westinghouse Science Journalism Award for his article in Fortune on the causes of earthquakes. [1] Lessing is the author of three books, Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong (1956), Understanding Chemistry (1957), and DNA: at the core of life itself (1967). He was for some time on the editorial board of Fortune magazine and was a vigorous opponent of government interference with and distortion of scientific fact (see, for instance, his essay "In Defense of Science", [2] and "Man of High Fidelity").
Lawrence Lessing collaborated with graphic designer Will Burtin for more than twenty years. The two are best known for the juxtaposition of Burtin's graphics with Lessing's descriptive copy. In a wartime project commissioned in 1942 by The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) on behalf of the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF), Burtin and Lessing created aerial gunnery manuals to teach new bomber crew gunners how to range and aim their Browning machine guns in order to hit fast–moving enemy fighters.
The two worked together again at Fortune magazine from 1945: Burtin became the magazine's art director, Lessing a noted science and technology writer and editor. Burtin started his own graphic design company in 1949, commissioning Lessing to write much of the text for the designer's science–based projects. Their collaboration extended through a series of Burtin's large-scale medical models from the late 1950s, ending only with Burtin's death in 1971.
Edwin Howard Armstrong was an American electrical engineer and inventor who developed FM radio and the superheterodyne receiver system.
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Paul Rand was an American art director and graphic designer. He was best known for his corporate logo designs, including the logos for IBM, UPS, Enron, Morningstar, Inc., Westinghouse, ABC, and NeXT. He was one of the first American commercial artists to embrace and practice the Swiss Style of graphic design.
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Edwin Emery Slosson was an American magazine editor, writer, journalist and chemist. He was the first head of Science Service, and a notable popularizer of science.
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Will Burtin (1908–1972) was a graphic designer from Cologne, Germany, known for interrelating design and scientific concepts within his exhibits. He was an influential designer, educator, and theorist in Germany and the United States. He arrived in the United States in 1939 after fleeing Nazism in Germany. In the U.S., he worked for Fortune Magazine and as an educator at Pratt Institute and the Parsons School of Design. He designed many exhibits for companies, such as Eastman Kodak, IBM, the Smithsonian, Mead Paper, Union Carbide, Herman Miller Furniture, and United States Information Agency. He received many awards and recognition for his work including a gold medal from AIGA. Many of his exhibits were reviewed in major consumer magazines, such as Newsweek and Life Magazine. He was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1974. Will Burtin died on January 18, 1972, in Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Burtin's cause of death was mesothelioma, cancer caused by exposure to asbestos.
Howard Charles Wainer is an American statistician, past principal research scientist at the Educational Testing Service, adjunct professor of statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and author, known for his contributions in the fields of statistics, psychometrics, and statistical graphics.
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