Related papers: Applying Popper's Probability
I think we can agree that dealing with uncertainty is not easy. Probability is the main tool for dealing with uncertainty, and we know there are many probability-related puzzles and paradoxes. Here I describe a rather idiosyncratic…
Eugene Wigner famously argued for the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" for describing physics and other natural sciences in his 1960 essay. That essay has now led to some 55 years of (sometimes anguished) soul searching ---…
Early 17th-century mathematical publications of Johann Faulhaber contain some remarkable theorems, such as the fact that the $r$-fold summation of $1^m,2^m,...,n^m$ is a polynomial in $n(n+r)$ when $m$ is a positive odd number. The present…
"Ever since the advent of modern quantum mechanics in the late 1920's, the idea has been prevalent that the classical laws of probability cease, in some sense, to be valid in the new theory. [...] The primary object of this presentation is…
On January 4, 2012, the centenary of Henri Poincar\'e's death, a colloquium was held in Nancy, France the subject of which was "Vers une biographie d'Henri Poincar\'e". Scholars discussed several approaches for writing a biography of…
This paper presents a plausible reasoning system to illustrate some broad issues in knowledge representation: dualities between different reasoning forms, the difficulty of unifying complementary reasoning styles, and the approximate nature…
Since its introduction by Fisher, the method of hypothesis testing that relies on computing error probabilities has witnessed several developments. Perhaps the most significant development was the seminal contributions of Neyman and Pearson…
Let $n\geq 2$ and $\mathbb K $ be a number field of characteristic $0$. Jacobian Conjecture asserts for a polynomial map $\mathcal P$ from $\mathbb K ^n$ to itself, if the determinant of its Jacobian matrix is a nonzero constant in $\mathbb…
Defeasible statements are statements that are likely, or probable, or usually true, but may occasionally be false. Plausible reasoning makes conclusions from statements that are either facts or defeasible statements without using numbers.…
Andrei Kolmogorov's Grundbegriffe der Wahrscheinlichkeits-rechnung put probability's modern mathematical formalism in place. It also provided a philosophy of probability--an explanation of how the formalism can be connected to the world of…
This article explores the following methodological principle for theory construction in physics: if an ontological theory predicts two scenarios that are ontologically distinct but empirically indiscernible, then this theory should be…
I'll discuss how Goedel's paradox "This statement is false/unprovable" yields his famous result on the limits of axiomatic reasoning. I'll contrast that with my work, which is based on the paradox of "The first uninteresting positive whole…
The classical conception of falsification presents scientific theories as entities that are decisively refuted when their predictions fail. This picture has long been challenged by both philosophical analysis and scientific practice, yet…
Wigner's famous and influential claim that mathematics is "unreasonably effective" in physics is founded on unreasonable assumptions about the nature of mathematics and its independence of physics. Here I argue that what is surprising is…
James Earl Baumgartner (March 23, 1943 - December 28, 2011) came of age mathematically during the emergence of forcing as a fundamental technique of set theory, and his seminal research changed the way set theory is done. He made…
R. A. Fisher introduced the fiducial distribution as a potential replacement for the Bayesian posterior distribution in the 1930s. During the past century, fiducial approaches have been explored in various parametric and nonparametric…
For the usual normal approximations to binomial, hypergeometric, or Poisson interval probabilities, we collect some simple but then reasonably sharp error bounds. For the Clopper-Pearson~(1934) binomial confidence bounds, we present,…
A popular scientific contribution should not contradict any established facts and ought to be understandable. I complied with both these requirements and am offering a sufficiently full introduction to probability theory. Furthermore, I…
After some brief biographical notes, Wolfgang Pauli's main contributions to general relativity, quantum theory, quantum field theory, and elementary particle physics are reviewed. A detailed description is given how Pauli descovered -…
We first show that there are practical situations in for instance forensic and gambling settings, in which applying classical probability theory, that is, based on the axioms of Kolmogorov, is problematic. We then introduce and discuss…