Related papers: Seven Concepts Attributed to Sim\'eon-Denis Poisso…
John Desmond Bernal (1901-1970) was one of the most eminent scientists in molecular biology, and also regarded as the founding father of the Science of Science. His book The Social Function of Science laid the theoretical foundations for…
I first met Louis Nirenberg in person in 1972 when I became a Courant Instructor. He was already a celebrated mathematician and a suave sophisticated New Yorker, even though he was born in Hamilton, Canada and grew up in Montreal. In this…
Aristotle was the first to declare himself in the class of natural philosophers ({\em physiologoi}) and he was the first physicist because he spelled out the first definitions of some basic physical concepts. Moreover, he was the first…
The World Year of Physics (2005) is an international celebration to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Einstein's "Annus Mirabilis". The United Nations has officially declared 2005 the International Year of Physics. However, the…
Mathematics is a highly specialized domain with its own unique set of challenges that has seen limited study in natural language processing. However, mathematics is used in a wide variety of fields and multidisciplinary research in many…
One of the great pleasures of working with Imre Leader is to experience his infectious delight on encountering a compelling combinatorial problem. This collection of open problems in combinatorics has been put together by a subset of his…
Isaac Newton, in popular imagination the Ur-scientist, was an outstanding humanist scholar. His researches on, among others, ancient philosophy, are thorough and appear to be connected to and fit within his larger philosophical and…
This article, dedicated, with admiration to Reuben Hersh, for his forthcoming 90th birthday, argues that mathematics today is not yet a science, but that it is high time that it should become one.
The Generalized Poisson Distribution (GPD) was introduced by Consul and Jain (1973). However, as remarked by Consul (1989), "It is very difficult to prove by direct summation that the sum of all the probabilities is unity". We give a…
This article gives a sketch of teachers and colleagues who have had strong influence on my becoming a particle physicist.
A number of elite thinkers in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries pursued an agenda which historian Paolo Rossi calls the "quest for a universal language," a quest which was deeply interwoven with the emergence of the scientific…
I am presenting a first-ever scientific collection of short sayings on probability and statistics expressed by most various men of science, many classics included, from antiquity to Kepler to our time. Quite understandably, the reader will…
This paper, in French, is a celebration of Max Dehn, and an essay of describing some of his results published in the beginning of the 1910's, and their offspring. It has been written up for a winter school in Les Diablerets, March 7-12,…
The purpose of this project is to outline various philosophies on the metaphysics of mathematics that have been prominent since the time of Cantor, highlighting some biographical aspects that have influenced these ideas as well. The main…
In 1963-71, a group of people, myself included, formulated and perfected a new approach to physics problems, which eventually came to be known under the names of scaling, universality, and renormalization. This work formed the basis of a…
In this paper, we first introduce the notion of a phase space of a Poisson algebra, and show that a Poisson algebra has a phase space if and only if it is sub-adjacent to a pre-Poisson algebra. Moreover, we introduce the notion of Manin…
The problem of axiomatization of physics formulated by Hilbert as early as 1900 and known as the Sixth Problem of Hilbert is nowadays even more topical than at the moment of its formulation. Axiomatic inconsistency of classic, quantum, and…
No woman of science has lived a more controversial life nor possessed a most contrasting character than Gabrielle Emilie Le Tonnelier, Marquise du Chatelet. One one hand, she was a woman of great intelligence, a philosopher of science, a…
Over the past few decades the notion of symmetry has played a major role in physics and in the philosophy of physics. Philosophers have used symmetry to discuss the ontology and seeming objectivity of the laws of physics. We introduce…
Einstein initially objected to the probabilistic aspect of quantum mechanics - the idea that God is playing at dice. Later he changed his ground, and focussed instead on the point that the Copenhagen Interpretation leads to what Einstein…