Related papers: Der rechnende Dichter (The calculating poet)
Here we review a kind of post-World-War-II "Nachtrag" to H. Weyl's philosophical comments on mathematics and the natural sciences published in the middle of the 1920s. In a talk given at Z\"urich in the late 1940s, Weyl discussed…
Many mathematicians find mathematics aesthetically beautiful and even comparable to art forms such as music or painting. On the other hand, every year a great number of school students leave mathematics with total disillusionment and…
This paper investigates the connections between combinatorial design theory and the creation of new forms of poetry through a specific combinatorial structure called Steiner triple systems. We introduce five original poems constructed using…
For many years, I have been collecting math jokes and posting them on my website. I have more than 400 jokes there. In this paper, which is an extended version of my talk at the G4G15, I would like to present 66 of them.
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…
Let n_\delta be the number of \delta-nodal curves lying in a suitably ample complete linear system |L| and passing through appropriately many points on a smooth projective complex algebraic surface. A major open problem is to understand the…
The authors are doing the readers of Statistical Science a true service with a well-written and up-to-date overview of boosting that originated with the seminal algorithms of Freund and Schapire. Equally, we are grateful for high-level…
Quantitative linguistics has been allowed, in the last few decades, within the admittedly blurry boundaries of the field of complex systems. A growing host of applied mathematicians and statistical physicists devote their efforts to…
The parts contributed by the author in recent discussions with several physicists and mathematicians are reviewed, as they have been occasioned by the 2006 book "The Trouble with Physics", of Lee Smolin. Some of the issues addressed are the…
Egbert Brieskorn died on July 11, 2013, a few days after his 77th birthday. He was an impressive personality who has left a lasting impression on all who knew him, whether inside or outside of mathematics. Brieskorn was a great…
The authors of cond-mat/9911072 claim to introduce "new representations of the Hecke algebra." These representations are shown to be the XXC models introduced two years ago in solv-int/9712008, and repeatedly studied and referred to in…
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,…
The apparently trifling unexpected hanging paradox has generated an enormous philosophical literature. We introduce the mathematician to this literature, paying special attention to aspects that involve nontrivial mathematics. This xxx…
We survey emigration of mathematicians from Europe, before and during WWII, to Russia.
This article attempts to place the emergence of probabilistic numerics as a mathematical-statistical research field within its historical context and to explore how its gradual development can be related both to applications and to a modern…
The definition of who is or what makes a ``mathematician" is an important and urgent issue to be addressed in the mathematics community. Too often, a narrower definition of who is considered a mathematician (and what is considered…
Vladimir Andreevich Uspensky [1930-2018] was one of the Soviet pioneers of the theory of computation and mathematical logic in general (and my teacher and thesis advisor). This paper is the survey of his mathematical works and their…
We try to understand Schubert calculus the way he did it
In this article algorithmic methods are presented that have essentially been introduced into computer algebra systems like Mathematica within the last decade. The main ideas are due to Stanley and Zeilberger. Some of them had already been…
In this explanatory work, we make an attempt to briefly discuss the work and technical achievements of twenty female mathematicians. The work may be useful as a historical resource, but there is very little biography or history, and the…