Related papers: A Mathematical Approach to the Plato's Problem
The hole argument was developed by Einstein in 1913 while he was searching for a relativistic theory of gravitation. Einstein used the language of coordinate systems and coordinate invariance, rather than the language of manifolds and…
We describe a balance weight dated to the Early Islamic Period from the Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa (Israel) Its polyhedral shape was attributed to a truncated elongated octagonal bipyramid. To our knowledge, the earliest…
The example of the calculus is used to explain how simple, practical math was made enormously complex by imposing on it the Western religiously-colored notion of mathematics as "perfect". We describe a pedagogical experiment to make math…
Inverse problems, where in broad sense the task is to learn from the noisy response about some unknown function, usually represented as the argument of some known functional form, has received wide attention in the general scientific…
Euler's solution in 1734 of the Basel problem, which asks for a closed form expression for the sum of the reciprocals of all perfect squares, is one of the most celebrated results of mathematical analysis. In the modern era, numerous proofs…
We define a new class of numbers based on the first occurrence of certain patterns of zeros and ones in the expansion of irracional numbers in a given basis and call them Sagan numbers, since they were first mentioned, in a special case, by…
The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox was enunciated in 1935 and since then it has made a lot of ink flow. Being a subtle result, it has also been largely misunderstood. Indeed, if questioned about its solution, many physicists will…
Logic has its origins in basic questions about the nature of the real world and how we describe it. This article seeks to bring out the physical and epistemological relevance of some of the more recent technical work in logic and…
In 1693, Isaac Newton answered a query from Samuel Pepys about a problem involving dice. Newton's analysis is discussed and attention is drawn to an error he made.
A modification and generalisation of von Plato's fix of the frequency theory of probability is presented. It is thermodynamic in nature. Von Plato already fixed the logical circle in the frequency theory, we generalise his results to not…
Translation from the Latin of "Annotationes in locum quendam Cartesii ad circuli quadraturam spectantem" (1763). The passage Euler is referring to is the "Excerpta" in part 6, p. 6 of Descartes' 1701 "Opuscula posthuma". Before reading this…
Why is space 3-dimensional? The first answer to this question, entirely based on Physics, was given by Ehrenfest, in 1917, who showed that the stability requirement for $n$-dimensional two-body planetary system very strongly constrains…
An "anorthodox" explanation of the recently discovered (1998) "acceleration" of the Universe is proposed.
In the 1970s, William Tutte developed a clever algebraic approach, based on certain "invariants", to solve a functional equation that arises in the enumeration of properly colored triangulations. The enumeration of plane lattice walks…
A research problem for undergraduates and graduates is being posed as a cap for the prior antecedent regular discrete mathematics exercises. [Here cap is not necessarily CAP=Competitive Access Provider, though nevertheless ...] The object…
As an inverse relation, involution with an invariant sequence plays a key role in combinatorics and features prominently in some of Shapiro's open questions [L.W. Shapiro, Some open questions about random walks, involutions, limiting…
In this text I present some problems which led to the introduction of special kinds of graphs as tools for studying singular points of algebraic surfaces. I explain how such graphs were first described using words, and how several…
William Oliver Martin published "The Order and Integration of Knowledge" in 1957 to address the problem of the nature and the order of various kinds of knowledge; in particular, the theoretical problem of how one kind of knowledge is…
This article is an abridged and commented translation into Spanish of the 1815 memoir where Gauss introduced the quadrature rules now associated with his name. Gauss' work does not resemble at all the stardard text-book treatment of…
Theories of decoherence come in two flavors---Platonic and Aristotelian. Platonists grant ontological primacy to the concepts and mathematical symbols by which we describe or comprehend the physical world. Aristotelians grant it to the…