Related papers: In Memoriam: James Earl Baumgartner (1943-2011)
This article is a brief Retrospective on the life and work of Robert W. Zwanzig, who formulated nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and who passed away in May of this year.
Over half century ago Carl Brans participated in the construction of a viable deformation of the Einstein gravity theory. Their suggestion involves expanding the tensor-based theory by a scalar field. But experimental support has not…
Forcing was first introduced by Paul J. Cohen in his work on the independence of the Continuum Hypothesis. Other formulations of forcing appeared using Model Theory, Boolean-valued Models, and Topos Theory. There is a folkloric claim that…
Sir Arthur Eddington is considered one of the greatest astrophysicist of the twentieth century and yet he gained a stigma when, in the 1930s, he embarked on a quest to develop a unified theory of gravity and quantum mechanics. His attempts…
In the causal set approach to quantum gravity the spacetime continuum arises as an approximation to a fundamentally discrete substructure, the causal set, which is a locally finite partially ordered set. The causal set paradigm was…
This contribution to the book in honour of J.S. Bell will probably differ from the remaining ones, in particular since only a part of it will be devoted to specific technical arguments. In fact I have considered appropriate to share with…
Alan Baker, Fields Medallist, died on 4th February 2018 in Cambridge England after a severe stroke a few days earlier. In 1970 he was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress in Nice on the basis of his outstanding work on…
Between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, several Arab mathematicians studied numerical algorithms on integers. The extraction of the square root of an integer is based on an algorithm known at least since al-Khwarizmi (died around 850)…
A central theme in set theory is to find universes with extreme, well-understood behaviour. The case we are interested in is assuming GCH and has a strong forcing axiom of higher order than usual. Instead of "for every suitable forcing…
In this survey we discuss some of the significant contributions of Ian Goulden and David Jackson in the areas of classical enumeration, symmetric functions, factorizations of permutations, and algebraic foundations of quantum field theory.…
Haavelmo (1944) proposed a probabilistic structure for econometric modeling, aiming to make econometrics useful for decision making. His fundamental contribution has become thoroughly embedded in subsequent econometric research, yet it…
Umbral theory, formulated in its modern version by S. Roman and G.~C. Rota, has been reconsidered in more recent times by G. Dattoli and collaborators with the aim of devising a working computational tool in the framework of special…
Discussions surrounding the nature of the infinite in mathematics have been underway for two millennia. Mathematicians, philosophers, and theologians have all taken part. The basic question has been whether the infinite exists only in…
For more than a century, Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers has played a pivotal role in set theory, with ramifications that extend to many areas of mathematics. This article extends earlier findings with a fresh look at the critical…
Irving Ezra Segal (1918-1998) has proposed some axioms for mathematical cosmology. These are here re-examined and Segal's redshift formula and energy conservation in the Einstein universe are established in full on their basis. A detailed…
The 75th anniversary of Turing's seminal paper and his centennial year anniversary occur in 2011 and 2012, respectively. It is natural to review and assess Turing's contributions in diverse fields in the light of new developments that his…
The Ehrhart quasipolynomial of a rational polytope $\mathsf{P}$ encodes fundamental arithmetic data of $\mathsf{P}$, namely, the number of integer lattice points in positive integral dilates of $\mathsf{P}$. Ehrhart quasipolynomials were…
Some 80-90 years ago, George A. Linhart, unlike A. Einstein, P. Debye, M. Planck and W. Nernst, has managed to derive a very simple, but ultimately general mathematical formula for heat capacity vs. temperature from the fundamental…
Certain generalization of Euler numbers was defined in 1935 by Lehmer using cubic roots of unity, as a natural generalization of Bernoulli and Euler numbers. In this paper, Lehmer's generalized Euler numbers are studied to give certain…
In 1970, Statistics giant, Bradley Efron, amazed the world by coming up with a set of four dice, let's call them A,B,C,D, whose faces are marked with [0,0,4,4,4,4], [3,3,3,3,3,3],[2,2,2,2,6,6],[1,1,1,5,5,5] respectively, where die A beats…