Related papers: Errico Presutti 1942-2024
This essay provides concise biographical information about eight physicists, astronomers, astrophysicists, and cosmologists from the twentieth century. The portrayed scientists are Hermann Bondi (1919-2005), Charles L. Critchfield…
Carlo Cercignani was known all over the world for his works on the Boltzmann equation and on kinetic theory. There was however another aspect of his scientific life, which is not much known. Namely, his interest for the foundations of…
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…
An account is given of some topical unpublished work by Ettore Majorana, revealing his very deep intuitions and skilfulness in Theoretical Physics. The relevance of the quite unknown results obtained by him is pointed out as well.
The Varenna school is a hub where generations of physicists, including numerous Nobel laureates, have shaped the field, often through collaborative exchanges across political and cultural boundaries. We examine the scientific legacy of…
In Europe (e.g., in Italy), and in the States, the opinion is widely spreading that the negative consequences of modern progress are the fault of "Science". A lively debate on this topic took place among the famous writer Leonardo Sciascia…
Aim of this paper is to retrace the path that led the young Enrico Fermi to write his paper on the statistics of an ideal monatomic gas. This discovery originated in his interest, which he had shown since his formative years, in the…
Irving Ezra Segal (1918-1998) has proposed some axioms for mathematical cosmology. These are here re-examined and Segal's redshift formula and energy conservation in the Einstein universe are established in full on their basis. A detailed…
This paper was written as a tribute to Mario Petrich, a major figure in the history of semigroup theory. Publication is posthumous in view of his recent death.
We commemorate 50 years from A. Proca's death. Proca equation is a relativistic wave equation for a massive spin-1 particle. The weak interaction is transmitted by such kind of vector bosons. Also vector fields are used to describe spin-1…
This paper gives a short review of the history of statistical physics starting from D. Bernoulli's kinetic theory of gases in the 18th century until the recent new developments in nonequilibrium kinetic theory in the last decades of this…
This article is a tribute to one of the most prominent Polish mathematicians Jozef Marcinkiewicz who perished 80 years ago in the Katyn' massacre. His personality and main mathematical achievements are described.
We review the life and remarkable contributions to Physics of Gregor Wentzel.
The mentioned article was written by Ettore Majorana, in a partially educational way, for a journal of Sociology; but he gave up publishing it (and threw it away). It appeared posthumous, thanks to Giovanni Gentile Jr. (the inventor of…
From 1929 to his death in 1944, A. Eddington worked on developing a highly ambitious theory of fundamental physics that covered everything in the physical world, from the tiny electron to the universe at large. His unfinished theory…
Steven Weinberg, renowned particle theorist and Nobel laureate, passed away in July 2021. We discuss selections of his work on effective field theory, electroweak unification, and symmetry related topics. We then add a few memories of…
The author recollects Sergio Fubini's impact on field theory (radial quantization, merons, conformal quantum mechanics) and on MIT.
This is the preface to a special issue of the Journal of Physical Organic Chemistry dedicated to an outstanding physical organic chemist, mentor and friend, Barry Carpenter on the occasion of his official retirement.
This is an intrusion in the life and the mathematics of Norbert A'Campo, intended to be a tribute to him and an acknowledgement of his impact on those who know him and his work. The final version of this paper appears in the book ``Essays…
2025 marks the 300th birthday of Father Eliseo della Concezione, professor of Experimental Physics at the Royal Academy of Studies of Palermo. To celebrate this anniversary, the Physics and Chemistry Library of the University Library System…