Related papers: In praise (and search) of J. V. Uspensky
In this paper, we are interested in the teaching of probability theory in Prague and Czechoslovakia, in particular during the 1930's. We focus specially on a textbook, published in Prague by Karel Rychlik in 1938, which uses Kolmogorov's…
This agile small "book" (in Italian) is an introduction to the life and work of Ettore Majorana, the brightest Italian theoretical physicist of the XX century, regarded by Enrico Fermi as the best theoretician of his time in the world. It…
Karl Pearson is the leading figure of XX century statistics. He and his co-workers crafted the core of the theory, methods and language of frequentist or classical statistics -- the prevalent inductive logic of contemporary science.…
Walks in the plane taking unit-length steps north and east from $(0,0)$ to $(n,n)$ never dropping below $y=x$ and parking cars subject to preferences are two intriguing ingredients in a formula conjectured in 2005, now famously known as the…
Topological models of empirical and formal inquiry are increasingly prevalent. They have emerged in such diverse fields as domain theory [1, 16], formal learning theory [18], epistemology and philosophy of science [10, 15, 8, 9, 2],…
I present some reminiscences, both personal and scientific, over a lifetime of admiration of, and friendship with, one of the Grandmasters of our subject.
This is an extension and background to a talk I gave on 9 October 2013 to the Brown Graduate Student Seminar, called `A friendly intro to sieves with a look towards recent progress on the twin primes conjecture.' During the talk, I mention…
Solomonoff's inductive learning model is a powerful, universal and highly elegant theory of sequence prediction. Its critical flaw is that it is incomputable and thus cannot be used in practice. It is sometimes suggested that it may still…
Extensions of the $Stirling$ numbers of the second kind and $Dobinski$ -like formulas are proposed in a series of exercises for graduates. Some of these new formulas recently discovered by me are to be found in the source paper $ [1]$.…
We consider the fundamental question of learnability of a hypotheses class in the supervised learning setting and in the general learning setting introduced by Vladimir Vapnik. We survey classic results characterizing learnability in term…
The ideas of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty are widely used to reason about the probabilistic predictions of machine-learning models. We identify incoherence in existing discussions of these ideas and suggest this stems from the…
Modern statistical software and machine learning libraries are enabling semi-automated statistical inference. Within this context, it appears easier and easier to try and fit many models to the data at hand, reversing thereby the Fisherian…
This paper presents an offering of some of the myriad connections between Combinatorics and Probability, directed in particular toward combinatorialists. The choice of material was dictated by the author's own interests, tastes and…
The original Schrodinger's paper is translated and annotated in honour of the 70-th anniversary of his Uncertainty Relation [published also in: Bulg. Journal of Physics,vol.26,no.5/6 (1999) pp.193-203]. In the annotation it is shown that…
To be published in the proceedings of IAU Symposium 239 "Convection in Astrophysics" (ed. F. Kupka, I. W. Roxburgh, K. L. Chan). Content: 1. From Nice to Prague, 2. The triumph of 3-D simulations, 3. How to lower the cost - what else can be…
Probability theory, epistemically interpreted, provides an excellent, if not the best available account of inductive reasoning. This is so because there are general and definite rules for the change of subjective probabilities through…
Incomputability as a mathematical notion arose from work of Alan Turing and Alonzo Church in the 1930s. Like Turing himself, it attracted less attention than it deserved beyond the confines of mathematics. Today our experiences in computer…
I share fond memories of my former PhD advisor Alexei Starobinsky with whom I was closely associated for nearly 45 years. I reflect upon my early years in Moscow when I worked with him on my thesis, and touch upon the seminal work on…
This book invites readers to see mathematics not just as formulas and rules, but as the deepest expression of human thought. It begins by exploring the timeless idea of mathematics as a universal language, contrasting its precision with the…
Over the past 20 years, Wikipedia has gone from a rather outlandish idea to a major reference work, with more than 60 million articles across all languages, including nearly 7 million in English [Wiki01]. Around 27,000 of these articles…