Related papers: Amy Ogle
This article discusses the life and work of Professor Ola Bratteli (1946--2015). Family, fellow students, his advisor, colleagues and coworkers review aspects of his life and his outstanding mathematical accomplishments.
The eighteenth century saw a flourishing of scientific and philosophical thought throughout Scotland, known as the Scottish Enlightenment. The accomplishments of prominent male figures of this period have been well documented in all…
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have the potential to democratize education by providing learners with access to rich sources of information. However, evidence supporting this democratization across countries is limited. We explored the…
General-education college astronomy courses offer instructors both a unique audience and a unique challenge. For many students, such a course may be their first time encountering a standalone astronomy class, and it is also likely one of…
The thermodynamic arrow-of-time problem is thought to be resolved by the observation that our universe initially was---and still is---far from equilibrium. The psychological arrow-of-time problem is often attributed the same resolution, but…
A trip through some of the standard examples of dimensional analysis and scaling, with further thoughts on yacht prices, growing up, mice, bears and marsupials.
Edited proceedings of an interdisciplinary symposium on consciousness held at the University of Cambridge in January 1978. The purpose of the Cambridge conference was to encourage distinguished scientists to express their views on the…
Understanding determinants of success in academic careers is critically important to both scholars and their employing organizations. While considerable research efforts have been made in this direction, there is still a lack of a…
How difficult is it for an early career academic to climb the ranks of their discipline? We tackle this question with a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of 57 disciplines, examining the publications of more than 5 million authors whose…
A popular scientific contribution should not contradict any established facts and ought to be understandable. I complied with both these requirements and am offering a sufficiently full introduction to probability theory. Furthermore, I…
Over the past several years, the authors have served as teachers, qualified scientists, mentors, and/or parents on dozens of science projects. These projects ranged from elementary school projects that can be completed in a weekend to high…
Personal recollections about Alexandre Grothendieck and early days of his theory of motives
An examination of George Boole's mysterious use of the Algebra of Numbers to create an Algebra of Logic, and subsequent research connected to this.
Mounting evidence suggests that publications and citations of scholars in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) suffer from gender biases. In this paper, we study the physics community, a core STEM field in…
A brief account of interesting moments in the genesis of the quark paradigm is presented.
The following is an unedited version of two short articles that are forthcoming in Nature Chemical Engineering. Inspired by Purcell's classic lecture "Life at low Reynolds number", I discuss how scaling arguments, dimensional analysis, and…
I examine some recent findings in cosmology and their potential implications for the emergence of life in the universe. In particular, I discuss the requirements for carbon-based life, anthropic considerations with respect to the nature of…
Science is a collaborative endeavor in which "who collaborates with whom" profoundly influences scientists' career trajectories and success. Despite its relevance, little is known about how scholars facilitate new collaborations among their…
Astronomy is not in the list of natural sciences aimed at by the Nobel awards. In spite of that, there were, throughout the 1930s until the early 1950s, effective moves by important scientists to distinguish Hubble with the Prize. A short…
The question of how to increase the number of women and minorities in astronomy has been approached from several directions in the United States including examination of admission policies, mentoring, and hiring practices. These point to…