Question: Which nationality is the mathematical physicist who invented a crackpot index to give an idea of what sort of claims and rhetoric were commonplace among pseudophysics proposals he had come across
Context: Public rhetoric refers to discourse both within a group of people and between groups, often centering on the process by which individual or group discourse seeks membership in the larger public discourse.  Public rhetoric can also involve rhetoric being used within the general populace to foster social change and encourage agency on behalf of the participants of public rhetoric.  The collective discourse between rhetoricians and the general populace is one representation of public rhetoric.  A new discussion within the field of public rhetoric is digital space because the growing digital realm complicates the idea of private and public, as well as previously concrete definitions of discourse.  Furthermore, scholars of public rhetoric often employ the language of tourism to examine how identity is negotiated between individuals and groups and how this negotiation impacts individuals and groups on a variety of levels, ranging from the local to the global. The crackpot index is a number that rates scientific claims or the individuals that make them, in conjunction with a method for computing that number.  The method, proposed semi-seriously by mathematical physicist John C. Baez in 1992, computes an index by responses to a list of 36 questions, each positive response contributing a point value ranging from 1 to 50.  The computation is initialized with a value of −5. John Carlos Baez ( ; born June 12, 1961) is an American mathematical physicist and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) in Riverside, California.  He is known for his work on spin foams in loop quantum gravity.  For some time, his research had focused on applications of higher categories to physics and other things. Pseudophysics is a pseudoscientific practice using the language of physics or discussing issues related to or pertinent to physics to promote ideas which are either incoherent or contradictory to known physics (experimental phenomenology).  According to physicists, skeptics, and science writers, pseudophysics tends to be promoted by so-called "cranks", whose ideas lack peer review, lack falsifiable predictions, and/or blatantly contradict scientific facts and experimental results.  Mathematical physicist John C. Baez famously invented a crackpot index to give an idea of what sort of claims and rhetoric were commonplace among pseudophysics proposals he had come across. The field of rhetoric has been a matter of considerable debate for millennia.  Derived from the Greek word for public speaking, rhetoric's original concern dealt primarily with the spoken word.  Aristotle wrote a philosophical work that still has major scholarly impact, "Rhetoric", in which he identifies five canons of the field of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.  Invention is concerned with the content or idea being expressed, and relates to the rhetorician’s understanding of his goals.  Arrangement deals with issues of how to best organize an argument in order to attain the speaker or writer’s goals.  It is closely related to style, the third element, which relates to gestures, metaphors, and word choices selected to best influence the audience and reach the desired goal.  Memory is the fourth and simplest element of rhetoric in being related specifically to spoken rhetoric, specifically concerned with remembering the words in one’s speech.  Finally, delivery concerns tone, word choice, posture and other such bodily signs that influence the effect of one’s words on an audience. The Nasty Boys are a professional wrestling tag team consisting of Brian Knobbs and Jerry Sags, active from the mid to late 1980s and throughout the 1990s.  Their gimmick was that of anti-social punks who specialized in hardcore wrestling and brawling.  They were noted for their distinctive all-black "street look", which, while very commonplace among today's wrestlers, was vastly different from the colorful attire of their wrestling peers of the late 1980s and early 1990s.  This included graffiti-sprayed T-shirts, chain-adorned leather trenchcoats, and their distinctive mullet-hawk haircuts. George Green (14 July 1793 – 31 May 1841) was a British mathematical physicist who wrote "An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism" (Green, 1828).  The essay introduced several important concepts, among them a theorem similar to the modern Green's theorem, the idea of potential functions as currently used in physics, and the concept of what are now called Green's functions. Green was the first person to create a mathematical theory of electricity and magnetism and his theory formed the foundation for the work of other scientists such as James Clerk Maxwell, William Thomson, and others.  His work on potential theory ran parallel to that of Carl Friedrich Gauss. The term "Armenian Question", as used in European history, became commonplace among diplomatic circles and in the popular press after the Congress of Berlin in 1878.  As with the Eastern Question, it refers to Europe's involvement with the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, beginning with the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78.  In specific terms, the Armenian question refers to the protection and the freedoms of Armenians from their neighboring communities.  The "Armenian Question" explains the 40 years of Armenian-Ottoman history in the context of English, German, and Russian politics between 1877–1914.  The term "Armenian Question" is also often used to refer to the question of Turkey's lack of acknowledgement of the events surrounding the Armenian Genocide. Morton E. Gurtin is a mechanical engineer who became a mathematician and "de facto" mathematical physicist.  He is an emeritus professor of mathematical sciences at Carnegie-Mellon University, where for many years he held an endowed chair as the Alumni Professor of Mathematical Science.  His main work is in materials science, in the form of the mathematical, rational mechanics of non-linear continuum mechanics and thermodynamics, in the style of Clifford Truesdell and Walter Noll, a field also known under the combined name of "continuum thermomechanics".  He has published over 250 papers, many among them in Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis, as well as a number of books. Visual rhetoric is the fairly recent development of a theoretical framework describing how visual images communicate meaning, as opposed to aural, verbal, or other messages.  Visual rhetoric generally falls under a group of terms, which all encompass visual literacy.  Purdue OWL defines visual literacy as one's ability to "read" an image.  In other words, it is one's ability to understand what an image is attempting to communicate.  This includes understanding creative choices made with the image such as coloring, shading, and object placement.  This type of awareness comes from an understanding how images communicate meaning, also known as visual rhetoric.  The study of visual rhetoric is different from that of visual or graphic design, in that it emphasizes images as sensory expressions of cultural meaning, as opposed to purely aesthetic consideration.  Visual rhetoric has been approached from a variety of academic fields of study such as art history, linguistics, semiotics, cultural studies, business and technical communication, speech communication, and classical rhetoric.  As a result, it can be difficult to discern the exact relationship between different parts of the field of visual rhetoric.  Some examples of artifacts analyzed by visual rhetoricians are charts, paintings, sculpture, videogames, diagrams, web pages, advertisements, movies, architecture, newspapers, or photographs.  Visual rhetoric seeks to develop rhetorical theory in a way that is more comprehensive and inclusive with regard to images and their interpretations.  Visual images and material objects have become more relevant in light of recent technological developments for understanding general communicative means.  Visual rhetoric is a conscious, communicative decision; the colors, form, medium, and size is chosen on purpose. <ref name="10/21/13"> </ref> However, a person may come in contact with a sign, but if they have no relation to the sign, its message is arbitrary.  Therefore, in order for artifacts or products to be conceptualized as visual rhetoric, they must have three characteristics: they must be symbolic, involve human intervention, and be presented to an audience for the purpose of communicating.
Answer: American