Related papers: Pierre Cartier: A Visionary Mathematician
This note is based upon a talk given at a celebration in Austin Texas of the achievements of J. Willard Gibbs. J. Willard Gibbs, the younger, was the first American physical sciences theorist. He was one of the inventors of statistical…
Based on Plato's Timaeus, we present some reflections on music, cosmology and mathematics and their mutual influence.The article is dedicated to the composer Walter Zimmermann. The final version of this article will appear in the volume…
In this paper, I aim to clarify the unconscious ideologies and attitudes held by physicists through Prigogine's work. Prigogine was an outstanding chemist and physicist who made significant contributions to the development of…
These notes are an exposition of Galois Theory from the original Lagrangian and Galoisian point of view. A particular effort was made here to better understand the connection between Lagrange's purely combinatorial approach and Galois…
We review the life and scientific work of F.V Atkinson, mathematician. The article consists of a brief overview of his academic and professional life followed by an extensive compilation of his life's work, some unpublished. He is best…
By the example of a Fourier transform, the possibilities of Hilbert space geometry applications for statistical model construction are analyzed. In accordance with Bohr's complementarity principle, mutually-complementary coordinate and…
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…
It is usually considered that the structuralist tendency in mathematics began in the twentieth century, at some point after the works on set theory and obtained its spreading through the works made by the Bourbaki group. In the present…
Logic has pride of place in mathematics and its 20th century offshoot, computer science. Modern symbolic logic was developed, in part, as a way to provide a formal framework for mathematics: Frege, Peano, Whitehead and Russell, as well as…
I argue that European schools of thought on memory and memorization were critical in enabling the growth of the scientific method. After giving a historical overview of the development of the memory arts from ancient Greece through 17th…
We review selected achievements of the late Bogdan Mielnik in the field of theoretical physics, with an emphasis on his attempts to go beyond quantum mechanics. Some of his original views on the problems of contemporary society and…
In the words of the twentieth-century British mathematician G. H. Hardy, "the human function is to 'discover or observe' mathematics" (1). For centuries, starting from the ancient Greeks, mankind has hunted for beauty and order in arts and…
Three thinkers of the 19th century revolutionized the science of logic, mathematics, and philosophy. Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), mathematician and a disciple of Karl Weierstrass, made an immense contribution to the theory of human thought.…
This is the introduction I wrote for the multi-authored book "From Riemann to differential geometry and relativity", edited by L. Ji, A. Papadopoulos and S. Yamada (Berlin, Springer verlag, 2017). The book consists of twenty chapters,…
Jean Deshayes, a teacher of mathematics in his native France, single-handedly put Qu\'ebec on the map, literally. An accomplished astronomer, he used the lunar eclipse of 10--11 December 1685 to determine the settlement's longitude to…
This is an overview of the life and works of Pavel Florensky, an important and singular figure of the period rightly described as the \emph{Silver Age of Russian mathematics}, with a substantial overlap with the \emph{Silver Age of Russian…
Steven Weinberg was a giant of late 20th Century physics on whose shoulders we stand while groping for the science of the 21st Century. This article provides a too-brief summary of a selection of his many achievements -- eight decades of…
Mathematics is one of the ways our species makes sense of this world and I believe that it is inherent in our thinking machinery. The mathematics we do in turn is dependent on the way we view our universe and ourselves. Lakoff and Nunez…
This is a survey of Berezin's work focused on three topics: representation theory, general concept of quantization, and supermathematics.
The unique and beautiful character of certain mathematical results and proofs is often considered one of the most gratifying aspects of engaging with mathematics. We study whether this perception of mathematical arguments having an…