Related papers: Emile Borel's difficult days in 1941
The genesis of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) after German re-unification as described here, shows that the history of the founding of the institute is not as simplistic as claimed e.g., in…
In this brief note I address the question not frequently asked, namely, why did it take two decades between Einstein's first proposal of photons and derivation of the full Planck formula from first principles of Statistical Mechanics,…
Foreigners and "estrangeirados", an expression meaning "people going to a foreign country ["estrangeiro"] getting there further education", had a leading role in the development of Mathematical Statistics in Portugal. In what concerns…
Bruno Touschek was an Austrian born theoretical physicist, who proposed and built the first electron-positron collider in 1960 in the Frascati National Laboratories in Italy. In this note we reconstruct a crucial period of Bruno Touschek's…
Classes started in the newly established Physics Department of Calcutta University Science College in 1916. Raman, Bose and Saha were three young members of the small physics faculty consisting of barely half a dozen faculty members. Within…
The present form of quantum mechanics is based on the Copenhagen school of interpretation. Einstein did not belong to the Copenhagen school, because he did not believe in probabilistic interpretation of fundamental physical laws. This is…
We summarize the papers published by Einstein in the Annalen der Physik in the years 1902-04 on the derivation of the properties of thermal equilibrium on the basis of the mechanical equations of motion and of the calculus of probabilities.…
Lecture Notes of the Les Houches Summer School 2003 on Quantum entanglement and information processing to be published as P. Zoller, J. I. Cirac, Luming Duan and J. J. Garcia-Ripoll, in "Quantum entanglement and information processing",…
The French Academy units of time and length - the second and the meter - are traditionally considered independent from each other. However, it is a matter of fact that a meter simple pendulum beats virtually the second in each oscillation,…
The topic of this paper is, on the one hand to introduce algebraic analysis results of \'Etienne B\'ezout (1730- 1783) not as we know them today but as he found them in his time, and on the other hand to emphasize his innovating viewpoints.…
A number of elite thinkers in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries pursued an agenda which historian Paolo Rossi calls the "quest for a universal language," a quest which was deeply interwoven with the emergence of the scientific…
These few pages briefly present the way in which Activity Theory has been adopted for several years now by French researchers in didactics of mathematics and has been adapted to study the learning of school mathematics in relation with the…
The 1896-1901 Milanese period is a key one to understand Einstein's training background. When he was a student at the ETH in Z\"urich (the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Z\"urich) from 1896 to 1900, he would make regular trips back to Milan…
Here we review a kind of post-World-War-II "Nachtrag" to H. Weyl's philosophical comments on mathematics and the natural sciences published in the middle of the 1920s. In a talk given at Z\"urich in the late 1940s, Weyl discussed…
It has been shown by us recently that Einstein was right in his controversy with Bohr or that the so called hidden-variable theory should be preferred to the Copenhagen quantum mechanics. In the following paper the corresponding arguments…
The isomorphism problem in ergodic theory was formulated by von Neumann in 1932 in his pioneering paper Zur Operatorenmethode in der klassischen Mechanik (Ann. of Math. (2), 33(3):587--642, 1932). The problem has been solved for some…
In interiors of celestial objects matter is subdued to extremely high values of pressure.Theoretical analysis of the behaviour of atoms and molecules under high pressure is a complex quantum mechanical and statistical problem. The aim of…
This work investigates the research performance of foreign faculty in the Italian academic system. Incoming professors compose l'1% of total faculty across the sciences, although with variations by discipline. Their scientific performance…
A brief review of Heisenberg's life and work: participating in the youth movement in the aftermath of World War I, creating quantum mechanics, conflict with "deutsche Physik", involvement in "Hitler's Uranium Project", last illusions.…
In 1919 A. Einstein suspected first that gravitational fields could play an essential role in the structure of elementary particles. In 1937, P.A.M. Dirac found a miraculous link between the properties of the visible Universe and elementary…