Related papers: Michel Henon, a playfull and simplifying mind
The article presents the main milestones of the science and technology biography of Ivan Edward Sutherland. The influence of the family and the school on the development of its research competencies is shown, and little-known biographical…
Academic challenges comprise effective means for (i) advancing the state of the art, (ii) putting in the spotlight of a scientific community specific topics and problems, as well as (iii) closing the gap for under represented communities in…
This paper is a survey of a large number of informal definitions of ``intelligence'' that the authors have collected over the years. Naturally, compiling a complete list would be impossible as many definitions of intelligence are buried…
Mechanistic Interpretability (MI) aims to understand neural networks through causal explanations. Though MI has many explanation-generating methods, progress has been limited by the lack of a universal approach to evaluating explanations.…
Each cognitive science tries to understand a set of cognitive behaviors. The structuring of knowledge of this nature's aspect is far from what it can be expected about a science. Until now universal standard consistently describing the set…
I attempted to write the full translation of this article to make the remarkable proof of Pierre Deligne available to a greater number of people. Overviews of the proofs can be found elsewhere. I especially recommend the notes of James…
Despite a surge in robotics research dedicated to inferring and understanding human intent, a universally accepted definition remains elusive since existing works often equate human intention with specific task-related goals. This article…
Are we smarter now than Socrates was in his time? Society as a whole certainly enjoys a higher degree of education, but humans as a species probably don't get intrinsically smarter with time. Our knowledge base, however, continues to grow…
This is neither an elementary introduction to singularity theory nor a specialized treatise containing many new theorems. The purpose of this little book is to invite the reader on a mathematical promenade. We pay a visit to Hipparchus,…
There are two important things in science: (A) Finding answers to given questions, and (B) Coming up with good questions. Our artificial scientists not only learn to answer given questions, but also continually invent new questions, by…
A recent high school graduate addresses the salient question: Should individualism or collectivism be encouraged in physics students? (Physics Today, Points of View, October 2013)
I introduce a decomposition of the h-index, which is nowadays the leading criterion to assess the relevance of a scientist in his/her research field. According to the proposed decomposition, the h-index is the product of two indicators, the…
Feyerabend frequently discussed physics. He also referred to the history of the subject when motivating his philosophy of science. Alas, as some examples show, his understanding of physics remained superficial. In this respect, Feyerabend…
This book chapter attempts to counter anxieties in the humanities and social science about the role of big data in research by focusing on approaches which, by being firmly grounded in the traditional values of disciplines, enhance existing…
Attitudes about artificial intelligence and machine learning are recent victims of endemic misunderstanding; given our increasing reliance on these technologies, the need for widespread understanding and confidence in their use is…
I provide a very brief sketch of some of Dirac's interests and work in gravity, particularly his Hamiltonian formulation of Einstein's theory and its relation to his earlier research.
A fundamental feature of human intelligence is that we accumulate and transfer knowledge as a society and across generations. We describe here a network architecture for the human brain that may support this feature and suggest that two key…
A project (e.g., writing a collaborative research paper) is often a group effort. At the end, each contributor identifies their contribution, often verbally. The reward, however, is very frequently financial. It leads to the question of…
This article aims at clarifying the language and practice of scientific experiment, mainly by hooking observability on calculability.
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…