Related papers: Gone but not forgotten
Brief recollections by the author of how he interacted with Feynman and was influenced by him.
This year is the 100th birth anniversary of Richard Philips Feynman. This article commemorates his scientific contributions and lasting legacy.
Incomputability as a mathematical notion arose from work of Alan Turing and Alonzo Church in the 1930s. Like Turing himself, it attracted less attention than it deserved beyond the confines of mathematics. Today our experiences in computer…
Steven Weinberg productive scientific life teaches us many things, one of the most important of which is the power of his example. This essay contains personal reminiscences and a speculation about gravitational wave propagation based on…
Problems for evaluation and impact of published scientific works and their authors are discussed. The role of citations in this process is pointed out. Different bibliometric indicators are reviewed in this connection and ways for…
I shall use a few personal reminiscences of my time as a student and colleague of Dirac in Cambridge to introduce some reflections on the nature of research in theoretical physics. I shall discuss and illustrate the approach of Dirac to his…
Newton's centuries-old wisdom of standing on the shoulders of giants raises a crucial yet underexplored question: Out of all the prior works cited by a discovery, which one is its giant? Here, we develop a novel, discipline-independent…
Which thinkers are we guided by? A novel "Thought Leader Map" shows the select group of people with real influence who are setting the trends in the market for ideas. The influencers in philosophy, sociology, economics, and the "hard…
In the first part of this paper I will describe my work together with Lars and in the second part I will give a look at some of Lars's oldest papers.
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…
An obituary of J.R. Dorfman. The focus is on his scientific career and on his many important publications.
A brief remembrance of some aspects of the author's scientific interaction with Stephen Hawking. A contribution to Physics Today's March 14, 2018 web page in which Stephen Hawking is remembered by his colleagues.
The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated social distancing at every level of society, including universities and research institutes, raising essential questions concerning the continuing importance of physical proximity for scientific and…
Erwin Louis Hahn was one of the most innovative and influential physical scientists in recent history, impacting generations of scientists through his work in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), optics, and the intersection of these two…
Research output and impact is currently the focus of serious debate worldwide. Quantitative analyses based on a wide spectrum of indices indicate a clear advantage of US institutions as compared to institutions in Europe and the rest of the…
Bibliographic data is a rich source of information that goes beyond the use cases of location and citation -- it also encodes both cultural and technological context. For most of its existence, the scholarly record has changed slowly and…
Alex, the main discoverer of high Tc superconductivity, was also a dear friend. Here I offer a few frank anecdotes, possibly inaccurate in some details but heartfelt and accurate in the substance, as a personal tribute to our friendship.
In this paper I shall try to sketch some typical aspects of Erich Lehmann's contributions to statistics through his research, his teaching, his service to the profession and his personality.
Steven Weinberg was a giant of late 20th Century physics on whose shoulders we stand while groping for the science of the 21st Century. This article provides a too-brief summary of a selection of his many achievements -- eight decades of…
I published an interview of Leo Breiman in Statistical Science [Olshen (2001)], and also the solution to a problem concerning almost sure convergence of binary tree-structured estimators in regression [Olshen (2007)]. The former summarized…