Related papers: Remembering Wassily Hoeffding
This paper summarizes a presentation for a panel discussion on "The Future of Astrostatistics" held at the Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy V conference at Pennsylvania State University in June 2011. I argue that the emerging…
What is the value of a scientist and its impact upon the scientific thinking? How can we measure the prestige of a journal or of a conference? The evaluation of the scientific work of a scientist and the estimation of the quality of a…
This article, produced as a result of the Symposium on Statistical Inference, is an introduction to the literature on the function of expertise, judgment, and choice in the practice of statistics and scientific research. In particular,…
Talk at the International Conference ``G\'eom\'etrie au vingti\`eme ci\`ecle: 1930--2000'', Paris, Institut Henri Poincar\'e, Sept. 2001. The title is a homage to Hans Rademacher and Otto Toeplitz whose book fascinated the author many years…
These notes discuss, in a style intended for physicists, how to average data and fit it to some functional form. I try to make clear what is being calculated, what assumptions are being made, and to give a derivation of results rather than…
Various aspects of recent sociophysics research are shortly reviewed: Schelling model as an example for lack of interdisciplinary cooperation, opinion dynamics, combat, and citation statistics as an example for strong interdisciplinarity.
Now that we have reached the centennial of Erwin Schrodinger's seminal paper introducing the wavefunction theory of matter, it is right and proper to inquire as to its legacy. It is undeniable that today every paper in atomic physics cites…
We weave together a tale of two rings, SYM and QSYM, following one gold thread spun by Richard Stanley. The lesson we learn from this tale is that "Combinatorial objects like to be counted by quasisymmetric functions."
We describe von Neumann's elegant idea for sampling from the exponential distribution, Forsythe's generalization for sampling from a probability distribution whose density has the form exp(-G(x)), where G(x) is easy to compute (e.g. a…
This chapter is based on a talk given at the Science and Ultimate Reality meeting in March, 2002, in honour of John Archibald Wheeler. In it, I discuss some questions related to what can and cannot be said about the history of a quantum…
Here we have discussed on Fermi-Dirac statistics, in particular, on its brief historical progress, derivation, consequences, applications, etc. Importance of Fermi-Dirac statistics has been discussed even in connection with the current…
These twenty-two lectures, with exercises, comprise the extent of what was meant to be a full-year graduate-level course on the strong interactions and QCD, given at Pactech in 19$xx$-$xy$. The course was cut short by the illness that led…
This opening editorial aims to interest researchers and encourage novel research in the closely related fields of sociophysics and computational social science. We briefly discuss challenges and possible research directions in the study of…
This book is the final version of a course on algorithmic information theory and the epistemology of mathematics and physics. This is camera-ready copy prepared for publication as a book, but at the last minute I decided to publish it…
This is a slightly edited translation of a paper in Dutch which appeared in Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde (5) 25 (2024), No.2, 87-90 on the occasion of I.G. Macdonald's death in 2023, and aimed at a very broad mathematical audience. First we…
When dealing with certain kind of complex phenomena the theoretician may face some difficulties -- typically a failure to have access to information for properly characterize the system -- for applying the full power of the standard…
Joel Scherk (1946--1980) was an important early contributor to the development of string theory. Together with various collaborators, he made numerous profound and influential contributions to the subject throughout the decade of the 1970s.…
Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. The last years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the…
This is an overview of the life and works of Pavel Florensky, an important and singular figure of the period rightly described as the \emph{Silver Age of Russian mathematics}, with a substantial overlap with the \emph{Silver Age of Russian…
This article discusses the life and work of Professor Ola Bratteli (1946--2015). Family, fellow students, his advisor, colleagues and coworkers review aspects of his life and his outstanding mathematical accomplishments.