Related papers: Bourbaki, or How Anatole France Reinvented Existen…
The theme of the influence of Bourbaki's ideas and methodologies on disciplines that transcend the mathematical field has been frequently addressed and, in particular, the reflection on the relationship between Bourbaki and Oulipo has…
Simone Weil is one of the most prominent 20th century French philosophers. She is the sister of Andr{\'e} Weil, the renowned mathematician, the father of modern algebraic geometry and the initiator of the Bourbaki group. Simone and…
This essay inquires how mathematical beings could be inserted into the architecture of modes of existence proposed by Bruno Latour in the framework of his pluralist and renewed ontology of the modern world. After a description of the…
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…
This year is the centenary of the birth of Ettore Majorana, one of the major Italian physicists of all times. In this note we briefly sketch a few biographical details about Ettore Majorana and introduce and discuss the main points of…
This article reflects on the life and mathematical contributions of Pierre Cartier, a distinguished figure in 20th- and 21st-century mathematics. As a key member of the Bourbaki collective, Cartier played a pivotal role in the formalization…
These notes provide an opportunity to discover the beauty of Bourbaki set theory, and I hope that they will facilitate the task to those who find it difficult to read this book, one of the most critical elements of the mathematics of…
In November 2014 Alexander Grothendieck passed away at the age of 86. There is no doubt that he was one of the greatest and most innovative mathematicians of the 20th century. After a bitter childhood, his meteoric ascent started in the…
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…
The novelty of the Jean Pierre Badiali last scientific works stems to a quantum approach based on both (i) a return to the notion of trajectories (Feynman paths) and (ii) an irreversibility of the quantum transitions. These iconoclastic…
We propose to follow the itinerary of Claude Chevalley during the last twenty years of his life, through the words of Jacques Roubaud, Denis Guedj and Alexander Grothendieck. Our perspective is that of their testimonies filled with…
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 short essay on the life and mathematical heritage of Coble. A substantially edited version will be part of the series of biographical memoirs of past members of the National Academy of Sciences. Version 2: minor changes. Version 3. Typo…
The year 2023 marks three anniversaries: the 150th anniversary of the French Physical Society, the 100th anniversary since the publication of Louis de Broglie's articles (the first fundamental articles of Quantum Mechanics) and the 50th…
Given two non-zero integers $a$ and $b$ there exist integers $m$ and $n$ for which $am-bn =(a,b)$. An increasing number of mathematicians have been calling this `B\'ezout's identity', some encouraged by finding "identit\'e de B\'ezout" in…
Do we have two kinds of reality: physical and mathematical? What is the role of mathematics in physics? These fundamental questions have intrigued original and brilliant minds since ancient times. A recent article (Aharonov, Cohen and…
Ettore Majorana, perhaps the greatest Italian theoretical physicist of this century (Enrico Fermi compared him to Galilei and Newton), disappeared misteriously from Naples in 1938, when he was 31. In the first part of this work we outline…
This paper, which is dedicated to Alan Turing on the 50th anniversary of his death, gives an overview and discusses the philosophical implications of incompleteness, uncomputability and randomness.
The article is dedicated to recalling the life and mathematics of Louis Nirenberg, a distinguished Canadian mathematician who recently died in New York, where he lived. An emblematic figure of Analysis and Partial Differential Equations in…
We show that a number of apparently separate extravagant Majorana's actions, including those connected with his disappearance are united by the invariant of behavior. It is based on "carrying into life" the principles of quantum theory. We…