Related papers: BourbOulipo. Relazioni tra Oulipo e Bourbaki
L. E. Ballentine's remarks in Physics Today about the QBist interpretation of quantum mechanics are generally wide of the mark.
We describe and explain the desire, common among mathematicians, both for unity and independence in its major themes. In the dialogue that follows, we express our spontaneous and considered judgment and reservations by contrasting the…
Philosophical thinking has a side effect: by aiming to find the essence of a diverse set of phenomena, it often makes it difficult to see the differences between them. This can be the case with Mathematics, Programming, Writing and…
The authors discuss the role of controversy in mathematics as a preface to two opposing articles on computational complexity theory: "Some basic information on information-based complexity theory" by Beresford Parlett [math.NA/9201266] and…
Vladimir Andreevich Uspensky [1930-2018] was one of the Soviet pioneers of the theory of computation and mathematical logic in general (and my teacher and thesis advisor). This paper is the survey of his mathematical works and their…
During the last decade, much attention has been paid to language competition in the complex systems community, that is, how the fractions of speakers of several competing languages evolve in time. In this paper we review recent advances in…
Aristotelian logic and its related traditions in antiquity are often held to have been equivalent to monadic predicate logic and as such inadequate to formalize mathematics as well as scientific and philosophical discourse in general. In…
We elaborate on some important ideas contained in Lobachevsky's Pangeometry and in some of his other memoirs. The ideas include the following: (1) The trigonometric formulae, which express the dependence between angles and edges of…
We are interested in Moebius function and related topics!
Mathematics is one of the ways our species makes sense of this world and I believe that it is inherent in our thinking machinery. The mathematics we do in turn is dependent on the way we view our universe and ourselves. Lakoff and Nunez…
The emergence of the new, non-Euclidean geometry of Bolyai, Gauss, and Lobachevskii (BGL) and its impact on modern sciences is the subject of a series of biennial conferences. Below, I briefly review the history.
We describe a mainstream "universalist" approach to the understanding of mathematics. We then conduct a systematic (but not exhaustive) review of the academic literature on the decolonisation of mathematics and identify how this challenges…
Disagreements that resist rational resolution, often termed ``deep disagreements'', have been the focus of much work in epistemology and informal logic. In this paper, I argue that they also deserve the attention of philosophers of…
We survey briefly the life and work of P. L. Chebyshev, and his ongoing influence. We discuss his contributions to probability, number theory and mechanics, his pupils and mathematical descendants, and his role as the founding father of…
This is an exposition of the contributions of L\'aszl\'o Lov\'asz to mathematics and computer science written on the occasion of the bestowal of the Abel Prize~2021 to him. Our survey, of course, cannot be exhaustive. We sketch remarkable…
In different passages of his dialogues, Plato showed deep mathematically-based physical insights. Regrettably most readers overlooked the respective statements, or they utterly did not understand those hints since they were full of…
This is a Bourbaki report on the work of Y. Andr\'e on the direct summand conjecture, and subsequent developments by Andr\'e and Bhatt on big Cohen-Macaulay algebras.
The situation surrounding the Olympiads is paradoxical. On the one hand, considerable resources are spent on the Olympiads. On the other hand, there are widespread arguments about the harm of the Olympiads, often very strange ones. For…
As for Shakespeare, a hard-fought debate has emerged about Moli\`ere, a supposedly uneducated actor who, according to some, could not have written the masterpieces attributed to him. In the past decades, the century-old thesis according to…
A small and unsystematic selection of my favorite appearances of mathematicians and mathematics in German literature. It includes classic and romantic (Lessing, Goethe, Wezel, F. Schlegel, Kleist, Novalis, Grillparzer, Heine), modern…