Related papers: Remembering Leo
The article is dedicated to recalling the life and mathematics of Louis Nirenberg, a distinguished Canadian mathematician who recently died in New York, where he lived. An emblematic figure of Analysis and Partial Differential Equations in…
In 1950, Alan Turing proposed an imitation game as the ultimate test of whether a machine was intelligent: could a machine imitate a human so well that its answers to questions indistinguishable from a human. Ever since, creating…
This paper is divided into two sections. In the first I give reasons for strongly recommending reading some of Henkin's expository papers. In the second I describe Leon Henkin's work as a social activists in the field of mathematics…
One of the less known facets of Ludwig Boltzmann was that of an advocate of Aviation, one of the most challenging technological problems of his times. Boltzmann followed closely the studies of pioneers like Otto Lilienthal in Berlin, and…
Breiman (2001) proposed to statisticians awareness of two cultures: 1. Parametric modeling culture, pioneered by R.A.Fisher and Jerzy Neyman; 2. Algorithmic predictive culture, pioneered by machine learning research. Parzen (2001), as a…
There are growing uncertainties surrounding the classical model of computation established by G\"odel, Church, Kleene, Turing and others in the 1930s onwards. The mismatch between the Turing machine conception, and the experiences of those…
How Enumerative Combinatorics met Special Functions, thanks to Joe Gillis
This talk presents a short review of David Brink's most important achievements and of my own experience working with him.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown capabilities close to human performance in various analytical tasks, leading researchers to use them for time and labor-intensive analyses. However, their capability to handle highly specialized and…
Supersymmetry is a theme with many facets that has dominated much of high energy physics over the past decades. In this contribution I present a very personal perspective on these developments, which has also been shaped in an important way…
We briefly describe our works in collaboration with Jean-Christophe Yoccoz, a great mathematician and friend, with special emphasis on those related to Homoclinic Bifurcations and Fractal Geometry. We also tell some related personal…
Theoretical physics suffered a major loss with the death of my dear friend Jan Zaanen on January 18. This note is my remembrance of him.
This paper is a short exposition of Stein's method of normal approximation from my personal perspective. It focuses mainly on the characterization of the normal distribution and the construction of Stein identities. Through examples, it…
This text offers reminiscences of my personal interactions with Roman Jackiw as a way of looking back at the very fertile period in theoretical physics in the last quarter of the 20th century.
Thomas Milton Liggett was a world renowned UCLA probabilist, famous for his monograph Interacting Particle Systems. He passed away peacefully on May 12, 2020. This is a perspective article in memory of both Tom Liggett the person and Tom…
In November 2014 Alexander Grothendieck passed away at the age of 86. There is no doubt that he was one of the greatest and most innovative mathematicians of the 20th century. After a bitter childhood, his meteoric ascent started in the…
This article stands as a tribute to the enduring legacy of Jacob Ziv and his landmark contributions to information theory. Specifically, it delves into the groundbreaking individual-sequence approach -- a cornerstone of Ziv's academic…
This article is a multiauthored portrait of Edsger Wybe Dijkstra that consists of testimonials written by several friends, colleagues, and students of his. It provides unique insights into his personality, working style and habits, and his…
As long as people have studied mathematics, they have wanted to know how many primes there are. Getting precise answers is a notoriously difficult problem, and the first suitable technique, due to Riemann, inspired an enormous amount of…
In his seminal paper ``Computing Machinery and Intelligence'', Alan Turing introduced the ``imitation game'' as part of exploring the concept of machine intelligence. The Turing Test has since been the subject of much analysis, debate,…