Related papers: Remembering Leo
This is a write-up of introductory remarks that I made at the UIC conference in honor of Lawrence Ein's 60th birthday. It presents an informal survey of some of Ein's work, interspersed with stories and reminiscences.
I was interested in the work of Solomon Marcus in Mathematical Linguistics as a high-school student. Later, I had the opportunity to discuss with him about many topics. He was a polymath. We wrote a paper together, and I refereed an…
In this talk I will describe the deep influence Planck had on the development of statistical mechanics. At this end I will first outline the theoretical situation of statistical mechanics before Planck. I will then describe his main…
Jerzy Neyman's life history and some of his contributions to applied statistics are reviewed. In a 1960 article he wrote: ``Currently in the period of dynamic indeterminism in science, there is hardly a serious piece of research which, if…
Irving John ("Jack") Good (9 December 1916 - 5 April 2009) was one of my greatest heroes and influencers. On Oct. 25, 2009, I gave a twenty-three minute talk with the present title, and this article is an extended transcript of that talk.…
Individuality and personalization comprise the distinctive characteristics that make each writer unique and influence their words in order to effectively engage readers while conveying authenticity. However, our growing reliance on…
We examine Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak and look at its likelihood, using a number of simple models. And it turns out that, contrary to many people's expectations, an extreme streak, while unlikely in any given year, is not…
Robert F. Coleman, a highly original mathematician who has had a profound influence on modern number theory and arithmetic geometry, passed away on March 24, 2014. We give an overview of his life and career, including some of his major…
The last century saw dramatic challenges to the Laplacian predictability which had underpinned scientific research for around 300 years. Basic to this was Alan Turing's 1936 discovery (along with Alonzo Church) of the existence of…
A recent essay [1] reminds us of how richly Boltzmann deserves to be admiringly commemorated for the originality of his ideas on the occasion of his 150th birthday. Without any doubt, the scientific community owes Boltzmann a great debt of…
This article is a summary of a talk about Richard Feynman, given at a conference Polymaths across the Eras organized in November 2023 by the St Cross Centre for the History and Philosophy of Physics (HAPP) in Oxford. It describes Feynman as…
I first met Louis Nirenberg in person in 1972 when I became a Courant Instructor. He was already a celebrated mathematician and a suave sophisticated New Yorker, even though he was born in Hamilton, Canada and grew up in Montreal. In this…
We consider an extension of Leo Breiman's thesis from "Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures" to include a bifurcation of algorithmic modeling, focusing on parametric regressions, interpretable algorithms, and complex (possibly…
About Conway's surreal numbers: A letter to a friend (written in French). In memoriam John Horton Conway.
This paper, which is dedicated to Alan Turing on the 50th anniversary of his death, gives an overview and discusses the philosophical implications of incompleteness, uncomputability and randomness.
Beginning in the 1970s, statistician-cum-logician Per Martin-L\"of wrote a series of papers developing what became Martin-L\"of type theory, realizing a system where the distinction between mathematics and programming disappears. Inspired…
Prosopography is usually used to globally describe a large population of ordinary subjects. It is thus opposed to biography, as a genre devoted to exceptional individuals. I show in this article how to use prosopography to study a single…
This is an expanded and updated version of the talk I gave at the meeting organized at CERN on April 27-28, 2015 dedicated to honoring the memory of Bruno Zumino and his legacy. In this talk I review the emergence of exceptional structures…
Berni Julian Alder profoundly influenced my research career at the Livermore Laboratory and the Davis Campus' Teller Tech, beginning in 1962 and lasting for over fifty years. I very much appreciate the opportunity provided by his Ninetieth…
Data miners (minors?) and neural networkers tend to eschew modelling, misled perhaps by misinterpretation of strongly expressed views of John Tukey. I discuss Vardi's views of these issues as well as other aspects of Vardi's work in emision…