Related papers: Roland Eotvos: scientist, statesman, educator
Supportive attitudes can bring to a blossoming science, while neglect can quickly make science absent from everyday life and provide a very primitive view of the world. We compare one important Greek achievement, the computation of the…
We give some personal reflections on the person and scientist Lars Brink and on some of his scientific achievements. Our relations to Lars are briefly described in [1] and [2], while the sources relevant for this text are summarised in [3].
These are lecture notes for a short winter course at the Department of Mathematics, University of Coimbra, Portugal, December 6--8, 2018. The course was part of the 13th International Young Researchers Workshop on Geometry, Mechanics and…
This is a translation of Proceedings of 22 th Symposium on History of Mathematics, Tsuda University 2011, on the work of Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues and on his life. His chef-d'oeuvre is the work on Euclidean motion group in 1840. He invented…
The Epicurean Philosophy is commonly thought as simplistic and hedonistic. Here I discuss how this is a misconception and explore its link to Reinforcement Learning. Based on the letters of Epicurus, I construct an objective function for…
Quaternions, discovered by Sir William Rowan Hamilton in the 19th century, are a significant extension of complex numbers and a profound tool for understanding three-dimensional rotations. This work explores the quaternion's history,…
Gravito-electromagnetism is somewhat ubiquitous in relativity. In fact, there are many situations where the effects of gravitation can be described by formally introducing "gravito-electric" and "gravito-magnetic" fields, starting from the…
An odd look at "standard" physics (Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Dirac) leading to a radical change of our concept of inertial motion and to new heuristic approaches of gravitation and the cosmological constant.
This paper is a celebration of the frontiers of science. Goodenough, the maestro who transformed energy usage and technology through the invention of the lithium ion battery, opens the programme, reflecting on the ultimate limits of battery…
The 'Imitation Game' is a Turing Test played with a human participant instead of a computer. Here the author, a sociologist, who has been immersed in the field of gravitational wave physics since 1972, tried to pass an Imitation Game as a…
These lecture notes are based on a set of six lectures that I gave in Edinburgh in 2008/2009 and they cover some topics in the interface between Geometry and Physics. They involve some unsolved problems and conjectures and I hope they may…
Scientific research is and was at all times a transnational (global) activity. In this respect, it crosses several borders: national, cultural, and ideological. Even in times when physical borders separated the scientific community,…
We discuss an experiment conducted by Nesvizhevsky et al. As it is the first experiment claimed to have observed gravitational quantum states, it is imperative to investigate all alternative explanations of the result. In a student project…
I will share with the reader what I have learned from Richard Stanley and the ways in which he has contributed to research in combinatorics conducted by me and my collaborators.
Large contributions to the near closure of the Universe and to the acceleration of its expansion are due to the gravitation of components of the stress-energy tensor other than its mass density. To familiarise astronomers with the…
The physics of gravitational wave and its detection in the recent experiment by the LIGO collaboration is discussed in simple terms for a general audience. The main article is devoid of any mathematics, but an appendix is included for…
This paper is devoted to Poincar\'e's work in probability. Though the subject does not represent a large part of the mathematician's achievements, it provides significant insight into the evolution of Poincar\'e's thought on several…
During the 1920s and 1930s, Italian physicists established strong relationships with scientists from other European countries and the United States. The career of Bruno Rossi, a leading personality in the study of cosmic rays and an Italian…
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…
Freeman J. Dyson, a brilliant theoretical physicist and a gifted mathematician, passed away on 28 February 2020 at the age of 96. A vignette of his outstanding contributions to physical sciences, ranging from the subject of quantum…