John Gray's son: Copyright 2002 Nationwide News Pty Limited Sunday Herald Sun [Sydney, Australia] May 26, 2002, Sunday SECTION: WIRED WORLD; Pg. U02 LENGTH: 331 words HEADLINE: Elementary table BYLINE: SAMANTHA AMJADALI BODY: SAMANTHA AMJADALI reports on a marriage of carpentry and chemistry Carpenter Theodore Gray could not understand why every periodic table -- the tabular listing of chemical elements according to their atomic numbers and properties -- he ever spied was either hanging on walls or printed on paper. Had no one else noticed the word "table" in the phrase? Surprised by the 133 year-long oversight, and horrified by scientists "generally doing all kinds of things with it that have nothing to do with being a table", Gray, a lover of mathematics and chemistry, resolved to one-day rectify the situation by creating a genuine periodic table table. So, last year, when he was commissioned to create an "unusual" conference table for US-based Jensan Scientifics, Gray grabbed the opportunity and has spent the past year crafting a table based on a traditional Periodic Table. Gray records progress on his work, dubbed the Periodic TABLE, on his website. The gigantic wooden effort, made from teak, birch, cherry and white oak, looks like a typical grid-based periodic table, except that each element is represented by a thick wooden panel that, when opened, reveals a small sample of whatever element it describes. Gray hasn't been able to find samples of all 110 elements. He's still missing about 30 samples, many of which are hard to find or, like mercury and uranium, too dangerous to store in an unstable environment outside a laboratory. Each element is accompanied by a hand-carved explanation of the element's chemical symbol, atomic weight, group and chemical number. The panels sit flush with the table's surface. The finished table will have a panel of glass over the top so that it can be used to write on. Gray's multitude of talents extend to programming. He's one of the chief programmers on Mathematica, high-end mathematical software used by professional mathematicians to plot complex formulas. [Indeed, he's a cofounder of Mathematica and member of the Executive Committee. -pjf] Theo Gray's website: www.mathpuzzle.com/Periodic.htm