Related papers: In Memoriam: James Earl Baumgartner (1943-2011)
Many hard problems in the computational sciences are equivalent to counting the leaves of a decision tree, or, more generally, summing a cost function over the nodes. These problems include calculating the permanent of a matrix, finding the…
John Desmond Bernal (1901-1970) was one of the most eminent scientists in molecular biology, and also regarded as the founding father of the Science of Science. His book The Social Function of Science laid the theoretical foundations for…
There are different meanings of foundation of mathematics: philosophical, logical, and mathematical. Here foundations are considered as a theory that provides means (concepts, structures, methods etc.) for the development of whole…
Delgrande's knowledge level account of forgetting provides a general approach to forgetting syntax elements from sets of formulas with links to many other forgetting operations, in particular, to Boole's variable elimination. On the other…
Building on early work by Stevo Todorcevic, we describe a theory of stationary subtrees of trees of successor-cardinal height. We define the diagonal union of subsets of a tree, as well as normal ideals on a tree, and we characterize…
Hans Grauert died in September of 2011. This article reviews his life in mathematics and recalls some detail his major accomplishments.
The concept of fact has a history. Over the past centuries, physicists have appropriated it in various ways. In this article, we compare Ernst Mach and Albert Einstein's interpretations of the concept. Mach, like most nineteenth-century…
Involutive Jamesian Functions are functions aimed to predict the outcome of an athletic competition. They were introduced in 1981 by Bill James, but until recently little was known regarding their form. Using methods from quasigroup theory…
Peter Bergmann was a co-inventor of the algorithm for converting singular Lagrangian models into a constrained Hamiltonian dynamical formalism. This talk focuses on the work of Bergmann and his collaborators in the period from 1949 to 1951.
Although Einstein's name is closely linked with the celebrated relation E = mc2 between mass and energy, a critical examination of the more than half dozen "proofs" of this relation that Einstein produced over a span of forty years reveals…
All physical systems in equilibrium obey the laws of thermodynamics. In other words, whatever the precise nature of the interaction between the atoms and molecules at the microscopic level, at the macroscopic level, physical systems exhibit…
We study L\"owenheim-Skolem and Omitting Types theorems in Transition Algebra, a logical system obtained by enhancing many sorted first-order logic with features from dynamic logic. The sentences we consider include compositions, unions,…
During a first St. Petersburg period Leonhard Euler, in his early twenties, became interested in the Basel problem: summing the series of inverse squares (posed by Pietro Mengoli in mid 17th century). In the words of Andre Weil (1989) "as…
The aim of these lectures is to give a short introduction to forcing. We will avoid metamathematical issues as much as possible and similarly we will avoid performing the actual construction of forcing. We assume familiarity with basic…
We show that the uniformly accelerated reference systems proposed by Einstein when introducing acceleration in the theory of relativity are Fermi-Walker coordinate systems. We then consider more general accelerated motions and, on the one…
It is with pleasure and pride that I introduce this special section in honor of Ingram Olkin. This tribute is especially fitting because, among the many profound and far-reaching contributions that he has made to our profession, Ingram…
In his seminal Inventiones paper from 1972 Grauert proved the existence of a semiuniversal deformation of an arbitrary complex analytic isolated singularity. For the proof he invented an approximation theorem for solving a system of…
We sketch the foundations of classical electrodynamics, in particular the transition that took place when Einstein, in 1915, succeeded to formulate general relativity. In 1916 Einstein demonstrated that, with a choice of suitable variables…
Neither the Euler-Mascheroni constant, $\gamma=0.577215\ldots$, nor the Euler-Gompertz constant, $\delta=0.596347\ldots$, is currently known to be irrational. However, it has been proved that these two numbers are disjunctively…
Although Bolzano's concept of the continuum has gradually evolved, the basis remained the same: the continuum as an infinite class of points arranged in such a way that the so-called \emph{Bolzano completeness} holds. Bolzano realized over…