Related papers: A Eulogy for Jack Good
We introduce Open-Universe Assistance Games (OU-AGs), a formal framework extending assistance games to LLM-based agents. Effective assistance requires reasoning over human preferences that are unbounded, underspecified, and evolving.…
The aim of this paper is to honor Ivo G. Rosenberg by describing some of his most influential results and their impact in logic, discrete mathematics, algebra, and computer science.
Denizens of Silicon Valley have called Moore's Law "the most important graph in human history," and economists have found that Moore's Law-powered I.T. revolution has been one of the most important sources of national productivity growth.…
A personal and informal account of what a pure mathematician might expect when using tools from deep learning in their research.
Ji\v{r}\'i Matou\v{s}ek (1963-2015) had many breakthrough contributions in mathematics and algorithm design. His milestone results are not only profound but also elegant. By going beyond the original objects --- such as Euclidean spaces or…
This article is a summary of eight of Jim Gray's transaction papers. It was written at the invitation of Pat Helland to be a chapter of a forthcoming book in the ACM Turing Award winners' series, "Curiosity, Clarity, and Caring: How Jim…
This article analyzes the existential risks artificial intelligence (AI) poses to humanity, tracing the trajectory from current AI to ultraintelligence. Drawing on Irving J. Good and Nick Bostrom's theoretical work, plus recent publications…
This paper is devoted to Poincar\'e's work in probability. Though the subject does not represent a large part of the mathematician's achievements, it provides significant insight into the evolution of Poincar\'e's thought on several…
The note discusses the concept of meaningful, physical information presented by Carlo Rovelli. It points out certain consequences of the information model not elucidated in the original paper but important to its comprehensive…
Yet Another Prolog (YAP) is a Prolog system originally developed in the mid-eighties and that has been under almost constant development since then. This paper presents the general structure and design of the YAP system, focusing on three…
Recollections by the author about how his interactions with John Wheeler influenced his career in physics.
Irving Ezra Segal (1918-1998) has proposed some axioms for mathematical cosmology. These are here re-examined and Segal's redshift formula and energy conservation in the Einstein universe are established in full on their basis. A detailed…
C.V. Raman (1888 - 1970) was a creative scientist, enthusiastic teacher and a science celebrity in India. In all these roles, he communicated science effectively. In this essay, I ask how and why did he communicate science. I take a few…
This paper celebrates the remarkable life, science and legacy of Abb\'e Georges Lema\^itre, the Belgian cleric and professor of physics; he was the architect of the fireworks model for the origin of the universe. He died half a century ago,…
James Burkett Hartle was a theoretical physicist who made major contributions to our understanding of relativistic stars, black holes, and cosmology. Most of his career, however, was devoted to studying the universe as a quantum system. As…
These informal notes are based on the author's lecture at the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics workshop on "AI to Assist Mathematical Reasoning" in June 2023. The goal is to think through a path by which we might…
We propose to follow the itinerary of Claude Chevalley during the last twenty years of his life, through the words of Jacques Roubaud, Denis Guedj and Alexander Grothendieck. Our perspective is that of their testimonies filled with…
Biographical essay at the occasion of the first death anniversary of Manfred Bonitz
This paper provides some reflections on the field of mathematical software on the occasion of John Rice's 65th birthday. I describe some of the common themes of research in this field and recall some significant events in its evolution.…
Some Goedel centenary reflections on whether incompleteness is really serious, and whether mathematics should be done somewhat differently, based on using algorithmic complexity measured in bits of information. [Enriques lecture given…