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This paper attributes the sudden emergence of mathematical probability and statistics in the second half of the seventeenth century to Calvin's Reformed theology. Calvin accommodated Epicurean chance with Stoic determinism and synthesised…
My thesis describes the life and work of the mathematician Major Percy Alexander MacMahon (1854-1929). His early life as as a soldier in the Royal Artillery and the events which led to him embarking on a career in mathematical research and…
Around 20 years ago, M. Van den Bergh introduced double Poisson brackets as operations on associative algebras inducing Poisson brackets under the representation functor. Weaker versions of these operations, called modified double Poisson…
We study the historical process that led to the worldwide adoption, throughout mathematical research papers and textbooks, of the denomination "Vandermonde determinant". The mathematical object can be related to two passages in…
In this classroom-based action-research project, I compared the following two approaches to check their effectiveness in helping students overcome physics misconceptions: Inducing cognitive dissonance or gradually building on students'…
In the year 1900 Max Planck was led by experimental observations to propose a strange formula for the intensity as a function of frequency for light emitted by a cavity. It relied on peculiar properties to be obeyed by the emitters and…
The University of Strasbourg, fundamentally humanistic since its creation, has a complicated history, being sometimes German, sometimes French through the ages. If one focus, from 1871, on the area of mathematics, we can identify two…
Professor Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994) was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century. However, in his most famous work he displays misunderstandings of science and mathematics at a basic level.
This paper reports the first study on the ability of Year 3 students (ages 7 to 8) to conceptualize Einsteinian concepts. This paper reports that children aged 7-8 are not too young to learn key Einsteinian concepts, and the benefits of…
Groupoids are mathematical structures able to describe symmetry properties more general than those described by groups. They were introduced (and named) by H. Brandt in 1926. Around 1950, Charles Ehresmann used groupoids with additional…
This history of the concept of fact reveals that the fact-oriented practices of German physicists and historians derived from common origins. The concept of fact became part of the German language remarkably late. It gained momentum only…
150 years after the discovery of quaternions, Hamilton's conjecture that quaternions are a fundamental language for physics is reevaluated and shown to be essentially correct, provided one admits complex numbers in both classical and…
Invented by Kurt Hensel at the very end of 19th century on the model of power series in one indeterminate, the $p$-adic numbers have not only become an indispensable tool of contemporary arithmetic, but a research topic per se. In this…
We present proofs of classical results in Poisson geometry using techniques from Dirac geometry. This article is based on mini-courses at the Poisson summer school in Geneva, June 2016, and at the workshop "Quantum Groups and Gravity" at…
The present paper deals with the life and some aspects of the scientific contributions of the mathematician Ren\'e Gateaux, killed during World War 1 at the age of 25. Though he died very young, he left interesting results in functional…
In this paper, I present a critical discussion of mathematical arguments employed in the philosophy of event of Alain Badiou. On the basis of "Being and Event" as well as his other writings, I analyze the main notions of his philosophy such…
This article, the third in a series about the Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765), covers the first decade of his research at the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, from his return from an educational his trip abroad in 1741,…
Eugene Wigner famously argued for the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" for describing physics and other natural sciences in his 1960 essay. That essay has now led to some 55 years of (sometimes anguished) soul searching ---…
A brief description and results of A.M. Mathai's research programme on statistics and probability, initiated in the 1970s, and its relation to physics is given.
Knowledge is a central concept within both Bayesian inference and the mathematical and philosophical program of logic and semiotics initiated by Charles Sanders Peirce and further developed by George Spencer-Brown and Louis Kauffman. The…