Related papers: On John Mather's Work
The scattering matrix (S-matrix), relating the initial and final states of a physical system undergoing a scattering process, is a fundamental object in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. The study of factorised S-matrices, in…
This paper is devoted to Poincar\'e's work in probability. Though the subject does not represent a large part of the mathematician's achievements, it provides significant insight into the evolution of Poincar\'e's thought on several…
Transcript of G.J. Chaitin's 2 March 2000 Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Distinguished Lecture. The notion of randomness is taken from physics and applied to pure mathematics in order to shed light on the…
John Barton was one of the experimental founders of particle astrophysics, working in deep underground locations all over the world. This note combines the obituary published in The Independent with a complete list of his publications.
The singularities of theta divisors have played an important role in the study of algebraic varieties. This paper surveys some of the recent progress in this subject, using as motivation some well known results, especially those for…
This book invites readers to see mathematics not just as formulas and rules, but as the deepest expression of human thought. It begins by exploring the timeless idea of mathematics as a universal language, contrasting its precision with the…
This article, dedicated, with admiration to Reuben Hersh, for his forthcoming 90th birthday, argues that mathematics today is not yet a science, but that it is high time that it should become one.
Roger Carter (1934--2022) was a very well known mathematician working in algebra, representation theory and Lie theory. He spent most of his mathematical career in Warwick. Roger was a great communicator of mathematics: the clarity,…
So far, the most magnificent breakthrough in mathematics in the 21st century is the Geometrization Theorem, a bold conjecture by William Thurston (generalizing Poincar\'e's Conjecture) and proved by Grigory Perelman, based on the program…
John Wheeler advocated the principle that information is the foundation of physics and asked us to reformulate physics in terms of bits. The goal is to consider what we know already and work out a new mathematical theory in which space,…
Homotopy type theory is a new branch of mathematics, based on a recently discovered connection between homotopy theory and type theory, which brings new ideas into the very foundation of mathematics. On the one hand, Voevodsky's subtle and…
Complexity is an interdisciplinary concept which, first of all, addresses the question of how order emerges out of randomness. For many reasons matrices provide a very practical and powerful tool in approaching and quantifying the related…
The works of William Rowan Hamilton in Geometrical Optics are presented, with emphasis on the Malus-Dupin theorem. According to that theorem, a family of light rays depending on two parameters can be focused to a single point by an optical…
This article discusses what can be proved about the foundations of mathematics using the notions of algorithm and information. The first part is retrospective, and presents a beautiful antique, Godel's proof, the first modern incompleteness…
An informal guide to the history of Heisenberg's matrix mechanics. It is designed for mathematicians with only a minimal background in either physics or geometry, and it is based upon Heisenberg's original arguments.
Sir Arthur Eddington is considered one of the greatest astrophysicist of the twentieth century and yet he gained a stigma when, in the 1930s, he embarked on a quest to develop a unified theory of gravity and quantum mechanics. His attempts…
We give a topological and geometrical description of focus-focus singularities of integrable Hamiltonian systems. In particular, we explain why the monodromy around these singularities is non-trivial, a result obtained before by J.J.…
Combinatorics is a fundamental mathematical discipline as well as an essential component of many mathematical areas, and its study has experienced an impressive growth in recent years. One of the main reasons for this growth is the tight…
As it is well known, classical mechanics consists of several basic features like determinism, reductionism, completeness of knowledge and mechanicism. In this article the basic assumptions are discussed which underlie those features. It is…
Mather and Yau showed that an isolated complex hypersurface singularity is completely determined by its moduli algebra. It is shown, for the simple elliptic singularities, how to construct continuous invariants from the moduli algebras and,…