Related papers: De Divino Errore
From the Rhind Papyrus and other extant sources, we know that the ancient Egyptians were very iterested in expressing a given fraction into a sum of unit fractions, that is fractions whose numerators are equal to 1. One of the problems that…
The Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens refined Archimedes' celebrated geometrical computation of $\pi$ to its highest point. Yet the rich content of his beautiful treatise \emph{De circuli magnitudine inventa} (1654) has apparently never…
The way Leibniz applied his philosophy to mathematics has been the subject of longstanding debates. A key piece of evidence is his letter to Masson on bodies. We offer an interpretation of this often misunderstood text, dealing with the…
Paradoxes are interesting puzzles in philosophy and mathematics, and they could be even more fascinating, when turned into proofs and theorems. For example, Liar's paradox can be translated into a propositional tautology, and Barber's…
The paper is devoted to a somewhat idiosyncratic account of the theorem of de Bruijn-Erd\"{o}s and Hanani from the combinatorics of finite geometries and its various proofs. Among the proofs discussed are the original proofs by de…
We prove sharp, computable error estimates for the propagation of errors in the numerical solution of ordinary differential equations. The new estimates extend previous estimates of the influence of data errors and discretisation errors…
Joseph-Nicolas Delisle was one of the most important scientists at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences during the first period when Euler was working there. Euler was helping him in his work on astronomy and in geography. In this…
We correct a common (but mistaken) attribution of the evaluation of the probability integral, usually attributed to Poisson, Gauss, or Laplace.
In this paper, we study the so-called 'Mathematical part' of Plato's Theaetetus. Its subject concerns the incommensurability of certain magnitudes, in modern terms the question of the rationality or irrationality of the square roots of…
One of the biggest mysteries of astrophysics is the question of how highly energetic particles in relativistic jets and cosmic rays are accelerated. Recently, it has been suggested that gravitational repulsion is the mechanism responsible…
In a very celebrated paper A. Connes has formulated a conjecture which is now one of the most important open problem in Operator Algebras. This importance comes from the works of many mathematicians who have found some unexpected equivalent…
We show that the celebrated 1956 Lax-Richtmyer linear theorem in Numerical Analysis - often called the Fundamental Theorem of Numerical Analysis - is in fact wrong. Here "wrong" does not mean that its statement is false mathematically, but…
Of the $(2H+1)^n$ monic integer polynomials $f(x)=x^n+a_1 x^{n-1}+\cdots+a_n$ with $\max\{|a_1|,\ldots,|a_n|\}\leq H$, how many have associated Galois group that is not the full symmetric group $S_n$? There are clearly $\gg H^{n-1}$ such…
The well-known Bayes theorem assumes that a posterior distribution is a probability distribution. However, the posterior distribution may no longer be a probability distribution if an improper prior distribution (non-probability measure)…
Transcript of G.J. Chaitin's 2 March 2000 Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Distinguished Lecture. The notion of randomness is taken from physics and applied to pure mathematics in order to shed light on the…
I gave a geometric proof of Vojta's 1 + epsilon conjecture. Some gaps in the published paper were spotted and kindly pointed out to me by Paul Vojta. These were addressed in "Erratum".
We present a new English translation of L.E.J. Brouwer's paper `De onbetrouwbaarheid der logische principes' (The unreliability of the logical principles) of 1908, together with a philosophical and historical introduction. In this paper…
Statistical learning using imprecise probabilities is gaining more attention because it presents an alternative strategy for reducing irreplicable findings by freeing the user from the task of making up unwarranted high-resolution…
I point out and diagnose an error in a figure in a textbook on classical physics. The error helps to illustrate a pitfall encountered when dealing with the shapes of objects, and perhaps also reflects general cultural attitudes in physics.…
This is the transcript of a lecture given at UMass-Lowell in which I compare and contrast the work of Godel and of Turing and my own work on incompleteness. I also discuss randomness in physics vs randomness in pure mathematics.