Related papers: Patrick Moss 25/10/1947--17/3/2024
Not only did Turing help found one of the most exciting areas of modern science (computer science), but it may be that his contribution to our understanding of our physical reality is greater than we had hitherto supposed. Here I explore…
Hans Duistermaat was scheduled to lecture in the 2010 School on Poisson Geometry at IMPA, but passed away suddenly. This is a record of a talk I gave at the 2010 Conference on Poisson Geometry (the week after the School) to share some of my…
John Mather is a great scholar who was dedicated to mathematics in his whole life. His works in mathematics can be characterized as original and foundational. He laid out the foundation of singularity theory while he was a graduate student.…
We begin by discussing the history of quantum logic, dividing it into three eras or lives. The first life has to do with Birkhoff and von Neumann's algebraic approach in the 1930's. The second life has to do with attempt to understand…
I was a student of Juris Hartmanis at Cornell in the late 1970's. He believed that there was great potential in studying restricted reductions. I describe here some of his influences on me and, in particular, how his insights concerning…
Mathematical maturity is a key concept for the professional life of a mathematician. This paper is not only a brief discussion of the importance of mathematical maturity but also presents some unusual ways we can use the concept to help our…
Starting from the dataset of the publication corpus of the APS during the period 1955-2009, we reconstruct the individual researchers trajectories, namely the list of the consecutive affiliations for each scholar. Crossing this information…
Stirling Colgate was a remarkably imaginative physicist, an independent thinker with a wide breadth of interests and contagious enthusiasm, a born leader with enduring drive to attack fundamental problems in science. Among his many…
The image of physics is connected with simple "mechanical" deterministic events: that an apple always falls down, that force equals mass times acceleleration. Indeed, applications of such concept to social or historical problems go back two…
The occurrence of Simpson's paradox (SP) in $2\times 2$ contingency tables has been well studied. The present work comprehensively revisits this problem using a combination of philosophical reflections, causal considerations, and…
This text offers a personal account of the scientific legacy of two giants of mathematical physics at the turn of the Millenium and their heritage in Canada, their land of adoption.
This text grew out of my lecture notes for a 4-hours minicourse delivered on October 17 \& 19, 2016 during the research school "Applications of Ergodic Theory in Number Theory" -- an activity related to the Jean-Molet Chair project of…
Modern demands of the statistics profession call for reimagining statistics training. The discipline needs to attract and develop students who are effective as real-world problem solvers, interdisciplinary collaborators, communicators,…
The information-theoretic point of view proposed by Leibniz in 1686 and developed by algorithmic information theory (AIT) suggests that mathematics and physics are not that different. This will be a first-person account of some doubts and…
Exactly 170 years ago, the construction of the real quaternion algebra by William Hamilton was announced in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. It became the first example of non-commutative division rings and a major turning point…
An account of the careers of the five women who completed a doctorate in mathematics in France before 1960 and became internationally known scientists, followed by a more general description of the place of women on the mathematical scene…
In this paper I shall try to sketch some typical aspects of Erich Lehmann's contributions to statistics through his research, his teaching, his service to the profession and his personality.
Let $s(n)$ denote the number of ones in the binary expansion of a natural number $n\in\mathbb{N}$. For any $t\in\mathbb{N}$ and $d\in\mathbb{Z}$, let $\mu_t(d)$ denote the asymptotic density of the set of those natural numbers $n$ for which…
In this article, I discuss the relationship of mathematics to the physical world, and to other spheres of human knowledge. In particular, I argue that Mathematics is created by human beings, and the number $\pi$ can not be said to have…
A pilot survey was sent to chairs of 14 doctoral math departments asking for three types of data: (1) category on job-placements for research post-docs leaving their department in three recent years; (2) category of jobs from which their…