Related papers: In praise (and search) of J. V. Uspensky
The book A Treatise on Probability was published by John Maynard Keynes in 1921. It contains a critical assessment of the foundations of probability and of the current statistical methodology. As a modern reader, we review here the aspects…
These lecture notes were prepared for a mixed audience of students, postdocs and faculty from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India and neighboring institutions, particularly the Institute of Mathematical Sciences. I am not an…
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…
Honorable Rector, Honorable Professors, and Students of this University: In these times of political and economic struggle and nationalistic fragmentation, it is a particular joy for me to see people assembling here to give their attention…
We discuss a connection between two areas of mathematics which until recently seemed to be rather distant from each other: (1) noncommutative harmonic analysis on groups and (2) some topics in probability theory related to random point…
This paper seeks to provide a thorough account of the ubiquitous nature of the Bayesian paradigm in modern statistics, data science and artificial intelligence. Once maligned, on the one hand by those who philosophically hated the very idea…
This article attempts to place the emergence of probabilistic numerics as a mathematical-statistical research field within its historical context and to explore how its gradual development can be related both to applications and to a modern…
Rather than offering chronologically ordered encyclopedic knowledge of a lifetime, only some of the most striking events of the existence of this well-known scientist are here pointed out. Sections: Life; Man of laws; Interest in…
This is the English version of my inaugural lecture at Coll\`ege de France in 2021, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxktplKMhKU. I reflect on the difficulty of multi-disciplinary research, which often hinges of unexpected…
The Weak Law of Large Numbers is traced chronologically from its inception as Jacob Bernoulli's Theorem in 1713, through De Moivre's Theorem, to ultimate forms due to Uspensky and Khinchin in the 1930s, and beyond. Both aspects of Jacob…
The life of Isaak Yakovlevich Pomeranchuk was short (20.05.1913 -- 14.12.1966). But the impact of his personality and his works on physics and physicists is remarkable. The talk describes the biography of I.Ya. Pomeranchuk, his major…
Not only did Turing help found one of the most exciting areas of modern science (computer science), but it may be that his contribution to our understanding of our physical reality is greater than we had hitherto supposed. Here I explore…
This is the transcript of a lecture given at UMass-Lowell in which I compare and contrast the work of Godel and of Turing and my own work on incompleteness. I also discuss randomness in physics vs randomness in pure mathematics.
Research output and impact is currently the focus of serious debate worldwide. Quantitative analyses based on a wide spectrum of indices indicate a clear advantage of US institutions as compared to institutions in Europe and the rest of the…
William Kruskal (Bill) was a distinguished statistician who spent virtually his entire professional career at the University of Chicago, and who had a lasting impact on the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and on the field of statistics…
These are a set of lecture notes for a mini-course I gave at The University of Warwick from October 30th to November 1st, 2024. Recordings of the lectures are available on Oleg Zaboronski's webpage at…
Prime numbers or primes are man's eternal treasures that have been cherished for several millennia, until today. As their academic ancestors in ancient Mesopotamia, many mathematicians are still trying hard to see primes better. I shall…
This article is a summary of a talk about Richard Feynman, given at a conference Polymaths across the Eras organized in November 2023 by the St Cross Centre for the History and Philosophy of Physics (HAPP) in Oxford. It describes Feynman as…
We offer an introduction for mathematicians to the univalent foundations of Vladimir Voevodsky, aiming to explain how he chose to encode mathematics in type theory and how the encoding reveals a potentially viable foundation for all of…
Throughout his entire mathematical life, Ramanujan loved to evaluate definite integrals. One can find them in his problems submitted to the \emph{Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society}, notebooks, Quarterly Reports to the University of…