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There has been a growing realisation that school science curricula do not adequately reflect the revolutionary changes in our scientific understanding of the 20th century. This discrepancy between current school education and our modern…
These few pages briefly present the way in which Activity Theory has been adopted for several years now by French researchers in didactics of mathematics and has been adapted to study the learning of school mathematics in relation with the…
Abner Shimony was an exceptional human being and a remarkably lucid and penetrating thinker whose work centered on some of the most significant physical and philosophical questions of his era at their nexus. He approached these questions…
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…
Einstein's thesis ``A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions'' was the second of his five celebrated papers in 1905. Although it is -- thanks to its widespread practical applications -- the most quoted of his papers, it is less known…
This paper takes James David Forbes' Encyclopaedia Britannica entry, Dissertation Sixth, as a lens to examine physics as a cognitive, practical, and social, enterprise. Forbes wrote this survey of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century…
Newton seems to have stated a quantitative relationship between the position of a body in relative space and the position of the body in absolute space in the first scholium of his Principia. We show that if this suspected relationship is…
Monsters lurk within mathematical as well as literary haunts. I propose to trace some pathways between these two monstrous habitats. I start from Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's influential account of monster culture and explore how well…
There is an increasing recognition regarding of the importance of introducing modern Einsteinian concepts early in science education. This study investigates the efficacy of an innovative educational programme "Einstein-First", which…
The classical platonist/formalist dilemma in philosophy of mathematics can be expressed in lay terms as a deceptively naive question: is new mathematics discovered or invented? Using an example from my own mathematical life, I argue that…
Sophie Germain (1776-1831) was the first woman we know who did important original research in mathematics, specifically in elasticity theory and number theory. Celebrating her semiquincentennial year, we outline Germain's recently unearthed…
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…
In this small note I try to summarize some observations about Euclid's remarkable role in mathematics and about the ambient philosophy.
In 1924, Satyendra Nath Bose dispatched a manuscript introducing the concept now known as Bose statistics to Albert Einstein. Bose could hardly have imagined that the exotic statistics of certain emergent particles of quantum matter would…
This paper reviews research results obtained from Einsteinian physics programs run by different instructors with Years 6, 9, 10 and 11 students using the models and analogies described in Parts 1 and 2. The research aimed to determine…
Thirty original and collected problems, puzzles, and paradoxes in mathematics and physics are explained in this paper, taught by the author to the elementary and high school teachers at the University of New Mexico - Gallup in 1997-8 and…
For the usual normal approximations to binomial, hypergeometric, or Poisson interval probabilities, we collect some simple but then reasonably sharp error bounds. For the Clopper-Pearson~(1934) binomial confidence bounds, we present,…
John Adams acquired an unrivalled reputation for his leading part in designing and constructing the Proton Synchrotron (PS) in CERN's early days. In 1968, and after several years heading a fusion laboratory in the UK, he came back to Geneva…
Throughout human history, people have used sight to learn about the world, but only in relatively recent times the science of light has been developed. Egyptians and Mesopotamians made the first known lenses out of quartz, giving birth to…
The space P of pure states of any physical system, classical or quantum, is identified as a Poisson space with a transition probability. The latter is a function p: PxP -> [0,1]; in addition, a Poisson bracket is defined for functions on P.…