Related papers: MacLaurin and Morality
The aim of this short note is to realize that the main reason for non-mechanistic explanation of Newton's gravitational attraction, is explicitly encapsulated in his famous General Scholium of the second Edition of Principia Mathematica…
In 1834-1835, Hamilton published two papers that revolutionized classical mechanics. In these papers, he introduced the Hamilton-Jacobi equation, Hamilton's equations of motion and the principle of least action. These three formulations of…
The nature of the existence, revealed through Human cognitive system, has been evolving since the development of the languages. Part of such revelations were the geometrical forms and the numbers, whose beauty and order, wondrous and…
Duerer's engraving ``MELENCOLIA I'' was circulated in two versions not previously distinguished. Besides their conspicuous early Renaissance scientific instruments and tools, they contain numerous apparently unreported concealments whose…
Two books, the "De Architectura" by Vitruvius and the "Naturalis Historia" by Pliny the Elder, give us a portrait of the Materials Science, that is, the knowledge of materials, in Rome at the beginning of the Empire. Here, I am reporting…
Barry Mazur published an article some year ago, where he showed, among other things, that the result in the so-called mathematical passage of Plato s Theatetus and Euclid s proposition X.9 in the Elements are very different, while almost…
This article traces the development of fluctuation theory and its deep connection to irreversibility, from equilibrium to near-equilibrium, and finally to far-from-equilibrium systems. Classical fluctuation theorems, which capture the…
Euler stressed the importance of hypotheses, which he thought were the only means of arriving at a certain knowledge of the physical causes, essential to establish the laws of physics. This thought was communicated to Emilie du Chatelet in…
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…
This is the transcript of a lecture given at UMass-Lowell in which I compare and contrast the work of Godel and of Turing and my own work on incompleteness. I also discuss randomness in physics vs randomness in pure mathematics.
The aim of this note is to provide a short and self-contained proof of H\"ormander's theorem about the smoothness of transition probabilities for a diffusion under H\"ormander's "brackets condition". While both the result and the technique…
University level mathematics in a number of countries is under pressure to `decolonise the curriculum'. This paper considers, as a test case, a possible `decolonisation' of linear algebra. This is a representative case, since linear algebra…
Jonathan M. Borwein (1951-2016) was a prolific mathematician whose career spanned several countries (UK, Canada, USA, Australia) and whose many interests included analysis, optimisation, number theory, special functions, experimental…
The Levin conjecture was proposed by Levin in 1962 which conjectures the solvability of any group equation with coefficients in a torsion free group. The Levin conjecture is recently shown to hold for group equations of length seven by…
After Isaac Newton was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705 he adopted an unusual coat of arms: a pair of human tibiae crossed on a black background, like a pirate flag without the skull. After some general reflections on Newton's monumental…
In this paper we present a first-principles analysis of the nonequilibrium work distribution and the free energy difference of a quantum system interacting with a general environment (with arbitrary spectral density and for all…
We review the close relationship between abstract machines for (call-by-name or call-by-value) lambda-calculi (extended with Felleisen's C) and sequent calculus, reintroducing on the way Curien-Herbelin's syntactic kit expressing the…
A number of elite thinkers in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries pursued an agenda which historian Paolo Rossi calls the "quest for a universal language," a quest which was deeply interwoven with the emergence of the scientific…
Abraham Robinson's philosophical stance has been the subject of several recent studies. Erhardt following Gaifman claims that Robinson was a finitist, and that there is a tension between his philosophical position and his actual…
In 1850, Foucault was the first to compare experimentally the velocity of light in air to its velocity in water. And as the wave and projectile theories competing at the time predicted inverse results to such a measurement, Foucault…