Related papers: Remembering Leo
This paper seeks to provide a thorough account of the ubiquitous nature of the Bayesian paradigm in modern statistics, data science and artificial intelligence. Once maligned, on the one hand by those who philosophically hated the very idea…
This is an exchange between Jerome Sacks and Donald Ylvisaker covering their career paths along with some related history and philosophy of Statistics.
Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is a fundamental problem in statistics. Characteristics of the MLE problem for discrete algebraic statistical models are reflected in the geometry of the $\textit{likelihood correspondence}$, a variety…
This is an article for a general mathematical audience on the author's work, joint with Terence Tao, establishing that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of primes. It is based on several one hour lectures, chiefly given at…
Advances in the performance of large language models (LLMs) have led some researchers to propose the emergence of theory of mind (ToM) in artificial intelligence (AI). LLMs can attribute beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions, and they…
This study explores the relationship between LinkedIn profile characteristics and professional success, focusing on the indicators of promotions, follower count, and career progression rate. By leveraging a dataset of over 62,000 anonymized…
I present my recollections of Richard Feynman's mid-1980s interest in artificial intelligence and neural networks, set in the technical context of the physics-related approaches to neural networks of that time. I attempt to evaluate his…
We survey the main ideas in the early history of the subjects on which Riemann worked and that led to some of his most important discoveries. The subjects discussed include the theory of functions of a complex variable, elliptic and Abelian…
Game theory is the study of tractable games which may be used to model more complex systems. Board games, video games and sports, however, are intractable by design, so "ludological" theories about these games as complex phenomena should be…
Climate statistics is of course a very broad field, along with the many connections and impacts for yet other areas, with a history as long as mankind has been recording temperatures, describing drastic weather events, etc. The important…
The theme of the influence of Bourbaki's ideas and methodologies on disciplines that transcend the mathematical field has been frequently addressed and, in particular, the reflection on the relationship between Bourbaki and Oulipo has…
In 1956, Charles Stein published an article that was to forever change the statistical approach to high-dimensional estimation. His stunning discovery that the usual estimator of the normal mean vector could be dominated in dimensions 3 and…
The observation that individuals tend to be friends with people who are similar to themselves, commonly known as homophily, is a prominent and well-studied feature of social networks. Many machine learning methods exploit homophily to…
In these shorts notes I want to remembermy relationship with GianCarlo Ghirardi, who was my supervisor in my Master Degree in Physics at the University of Trieste and then he became a very deep and close friend. I don't want to describe in…
Self-preference is a fundamental feature of biological organisms. Since large language models (LLMs) lack sentience, they might be expected to avoid such distortions. Yet, across 72 experiments and ~41,000 queries, we discovered massive…
I will share with the reader what I have learned from Richard Stanley and the ways in which he has contributed to research in combinatorics conducted by me and my collaborators.
David Brink was one of the leading theoretical nuclear physicists of his generation. He made major contributions to the study of all aspects of nuclear physics embracing nuclear structure, nuclear scattering, and nuclear instability. His…
Human-AI teams play a pivotal role in improving overall system performance when neither the human nor the model can achieve such performance on their own. With the advent of powerful and accessible Generative AI models, several mundane…
I expand on some ideas from my recent review "String theory to the rescue," I discuss my use of Bayesian reasoning. I argue that it can be useful but that it is very far from the central point of the discussion. I then review my own…
In this brief note, there is a short recollection of my scientific interactions with the great Russian mathematician Sergey Konstantinovich Godunov.