Related papers: In Memoriam: James Earl Baumgartner (1943-2011)
One of the most important philosophers in history, the German Friedrich Nietzsche, is almost ignored by physicists. This author who declared the death of God in the 19th century was a science enthusiast, especially in the second period of…
As we mark the centenary of Albert Einstein's seminal contribution to both quantum mechanics and special relativity, we approach another anniversary--that of Einstein's foundation of the quantum theory of solids. But 100 years on, the same…
James Philip Elliott, one of the towering figures of nuclear physics of the second half of the twentieth century, died on the 21st of October 2008. Obituaries appeared in the British press but relatively little attention was paid by the…
Egbert Brieskorn died on July 11, 2013, a few days after his 77th birthday. He was an impressive personality who has left a lasting impression on all who knew him, whether inside or outside of mathematics. Brieskorn was a great…
Egbert Brieskorn died on July 11, 2013, a few days after his 77th birthday. He was an impressive personality who has left a lasting impression on all who knew him, whether inside or outside of mathematics. Brieskorn was a great…
We introduce a category whose objects are stationary set preserving complete boolean algebras and whose arrows are complete homomorphisms with a stationary set preserving quotient. We show that the cut of this category at a rank initial…
This paper is about two things: (i) Charles Sanders Peirce (1837-1914) -- an iconoclastic philosopher and polymath who is among the greatest of American minds. (ii) Abductive inference -- a term coined by C. S. Peirce, which he defined as…
An intriguing heuristic model of development, decline, and change conceived by Bernard J.F. Lonergan (BL) in the late 1940's was laid out in a manner now recognizable as representing an early model of complexity. This report is a first…
Julian Schwinger (1918--1994), founder of renormalized quantum electrodynamics, was arguably the leading theoretical physicist of the second half of the 20th century. Thus it is not surprising that he made contributions to gravity theory as…
Fermi helped establish a new framework for understanding matter, based on quantum theory. This framework refines and improves traditional atomism in two crucial respects. First, the elementary constituents of matter belong to a very small…
In 1993, just about a century after the epoch of Classical Invariant Theory and almost 30 years after Mumford's seminal book on Geometric Invariant Theory, Bernd Sturmfels approached the subject from a new, algorithmic perspective in his…
From 1929 to his death in 1944, A. Eddington worked on developing a highly ambitious theory of fundamental physics that covered everything in the physical world, from the tiny electron to the universe at large. His unfinished theory…
Joel Scherk (1946--1980) was an important early contributor to the development of string theory. Together with various collaborators, he made numerous profound and influential contributions to the subject throughout the decade of the 1970s.…
I survey an array of topics in set theory in the context of a novel class of forcing notions: subcomplete forcing. Subcompleteness was originally defined by Ronald Jensen. I have attempted to make the subject somewhat more approachable to…
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…
The Binomial Theorem has long been essential in mathematics. In one form or another it was known to the ancients and, in the hands of Leibniz, Newton, Euler, Galois, and others, it became an essential tool in both algebra and analysis.…
We prove a theorem on iterated forcing that can be used for preservation of $\aleph_2$ and $\aleph_1$ in iterations with supports of size $\aleph_1$ of forcings that have amalgamation properties similar to those present in the perfect set…
Despite being known for his pioneering work on chaotic unpredictability, the key discovery at the core of meteorologist Ed Lorenz's work is the link between space-time calculus and state-space fractal geometry. Indeed, properties of…
In the seminal essay, "On the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences," physicist Eugene Wigner poses a fundamental philosophical question concerning the relationship between a physical system and our capacity to…
Leonhard Euler likely developed his summation formula in 1732, and soon used it to estimate the sum of the reciprocal squares to 14 digits --- a value mathematicians had been competing to determine since Leibniz's astonishing discovery that…