Cerritos Library Study Room Men's Names Voting Survey

The community is invited to vote for two men's names that will remain on the Cerritos Library Study Rooms. This voting survey will be available through 5 p.m. on Thursday, December 28, 2023. Survey participants can vote for up to two of the following names: Isaac Asimov, Aldous Huxley, Nikola Tesla, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. The adjacent Access Plus Room will retain the name George Orwell as it is not a Study Room.

Three of the Study Rooms will be renamed after Marie Curie, Katherine Johnson and Chien-Shiung Wu. The names were chosen through an online voting survey. The Cerritos City Council approved the renaming project in response to a suggestion from members of the local community, as all of the rooms are currently named for men. Biographical information listed below is from the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Question Title

* 1. Please select up to two names from the following list.

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)
The author of more than 400 books on a broad range of subjects, Isaac Asimov called himself a “born explainer.” His streamlined versions of science facts are as popular as his science fiction, and his works include history and mysteries. In 1938, while he was still a teenager, he sold his first short story, “Marooned Off Vesta,” to “Amazing Stories.”

After postgraduate work at Columbia University, Asimov began teaching biochemistry at Boston University in 1949. The next year his first books—the futuristic satire “Pebble in the Sky” and the thriller “I, Robot”—were published. As the pace and scope of his writing increased, he moved to New York City for a freelance career but retained his academic title.

Decades ahead of their time, Asimov’s “The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science” (1960) and “Today and Tomorrow and …” (1973) are still popular with researchers. With his wife, Janet, he wrote a series of children’s books about a mixed-up robot named Norby. Two volumes of autobiography—“In Memory Yet Green” and “In Joy Still Felt”—cover the years 1920 to 1954 and 1954 to 1978.

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
The English writer and critic Aldous Huxley planned to become a doctor, but an illness that left him partially blind changed those plans. His passion for science served him well in his literary career, however. His novels, poems, essays, and critical works all display a keen interest in the workings of the natural world. He maintained his scientific outlook while also developing mystical beliefs and practices later in his life.

While attending Eton he became partially blind owing to keratitis, but he retained enough eyesight to read with difficulty. He graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1916. He published his first book in 1916 and worked on the periodical “Athenaeum” from 1919 to 1921. Thereafter he devoted himself largely to his own writing and spent much of his time in Italy until the late 1930s, when he settled in California.

In Huxley’s pessimistic worldview, society had become callous and harsh. Many of his writings reflect his concern with the minimal potential for any individual in modern society. His brilliantly satirical early novels included “Crome Yellow” (1921) and “Antic Hay” (1923), both of which attack the London literary society of the post–World War I period. “Point Counter Point” (1928) and “Brave New World” (1932) are considered two of Huxley’s finest works. “Brave New World” portrays a future society based on psychological conditioning. The vision is horrifying, and the novel is considered one of the best examples of anti-utopian literature. “Eyeless in Gaza” (1936), “Time Must Have a Stop” (1944), and “Brave New World Revisited” (1958) all reflect Huxley’s interest in mysticism. His volumes of poetry include “Leda and Other Poems” (1920), “Apennine” (1930), and “The Cicadas and Other Poems” (1931).

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943)
The brilliant inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current (AC) power system that provides electricity for homes and buildings. Tesla was granted more than 100 United States patents. Many of his discoveries led to electronic developments for which other scientists were honored.

After his graduation from the University of Prague in 1880, Tesla worked as a telephone engineer in Budapest, Hungary. By 1882 he had devised an AC power system to replace the weak direct-current (DC) generators and motors then in use. Tesla moved to the United States in 1884. Thomas Edison hired the young engineer as an assistant upon his arrival. Friction soon developed between the two, and by 1886 Tesla had lost his job.

Tesla became a United States citizen in 1891. A year earlier he had received a patent for his AC power system. At the heart of this system was the efficient polyphase induction motor that he developed. George Westinghouse bought the patent rights from Tesla. Westinghouse then launched the campaign that established alternating current as the prime electrical power supply in the United States.

Tesla later invented a high-frequency transformer, called the Tesla coil, which made AC power transmission practical. He also experimented with radio and designed an electronic tube for use as the detector in a voice radio system almost 20 years before Lee De Forest developed a similar device. The Tesla Museum in Belgrade, Serbia, was dedicated to the inventor. In 1956 the tesla, a unit of magnetic flux density in the metric system, was named in his honor.

Jules Verne (1828–1905)
The startling inventions described in the novels of Jules Verne seemed highly fantastic to the readers of his time. Today he is regarded as a prophet. His dreams of undersea and air travel have come true, and Verne’s story “Around the World in Eighty Days” now seems a record of a leisurely trip.

Verne began to write poetry and plays at an early age, but he had little success until he published “Five Weeks in a Balloon” in 1863. This fantastic tale delighted readers, both young and old. Its success led Verne to continue writing exciting stories of adventure. He studied geography and science to get ideas for his tales.

Verne’s works include many short stories and more than 50 novels. The most popular novels include “A Journey to the Center of the Earth” (1864); “From the Earth to the Moon” (1865); “The Mysterious Island” (1870); “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” (1870); and “Around the World in Eighty Days” (1872).

H.G. Wells (1866–1946)
English novelist, journalist, sociologist and historian H.G. Wells was a prolific writer best known for such science-fiction novels as “The Time Machine” (1895) and “The War of the Worlds” (1898). He also wrote comic novels, histories, biographies, social commentaries and short stories.

Wells’s first published book was the two-volume “Text-Book of Biology” (1893).Two years later he published his first novel, “The Time Machine.” The book tells of a nameless Time Traveler who uses an elaborate contraption to travel to the year 802,701. Scholars consider “The Time Machine” one of the earliest works of science fiction and the first with a “time travel” theme.

The Time Machine was immediately successful, so Wells began to write a series of science-fiction novels. “The Island of Doctor Moreau” (1896), about a mad scientist’s experiments on animals, addresses such issues as evolution and ethics. “The Invisible Man” (1897) follows the life and death of a scientist who has gone mad. Wells’s 1898 book “The War of the Worlds” details a catastrophic conflict between humans and extraterrestrial “Martians.” His other science-fiction books of the time included “The Wonderful Visit” (1895), “The First Men in the Moon” (1901), and “The Food of the Gods” (1904). Many of the events that he wrote about, including space exploration, eventually came true. Wells also wrote many short stories, which were collected in “The Stolen Bacillus” (1895), “The Plattner Story” (1897), and “Tales of Space and Time” (1899).