Related papers: Isaac Newton as a Probabilist
I am presenting a first-ever scientific collection of short sayings on probability and statistics expressed by most various men of science, many classics included, from antiquity to Kepler to our time. Quite understandably, the reader will…
The book A Treatise on Probability was published by John Maynard Keynes in 1921. It contains a critical assessment of the foundations of probability and of the current statistical methodology. As a modern reader, we review here the aspects…
The article attempts to demonstrate the rich history of one truly remarkable problem situated at the confluence of probability theory and theory of numbers - finding the probability of co-primality of two randomly selected natural numbers.…
We give an introduction to vertex algebras using elementary forward difference methods originally due to Isaac Newton.
The purpose of this note consists of discrete rational reconstruction which took place during the years 1609-1630 and 1630-1666, ie, the year of the publication of their Astronomia Nova and the year of death of the great German astronomer…
There are important problems in physics related to the concept of probability. One of these problems is related to negative probabilities used in physics from 1930s. In spite of many demonstrations of usefulness of negative probabilities,…
The classical platonist/formalist dilemma in philosophy of mathematics can be expressed in lay terms as a deceptively naive question: is new mathematics discovered or invented? Using an example from my own mathematical life, I argue that…
The term Gibbons conjecture is widely used in connection with symmetry results for the Allen-Cahn equation. However, its origin is less transparent than its frequent citation suggests. In this note, we revisit its emergence, tracing it to a…
It is known that Sir Isaac Newton suggested a date for the Passion of Christ in the posthumously published "Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John" (1733). What was not known is that the first attempts to…
The dissemination of natural philosophy in the 18th-century, which was based primarily on Newton's pioneering work in mechanics, optics and astrophysics, is presented as seen through a remarkable textbook written by a little known Irish…
The Bayesian statistical paradigm uses the language of probability to express uncertainty about the phenomena that generate observed data. Probability distributions thus characterize Bayesian analysis, with the rules of probability used to…
The so-called problem of grue was introduced by Nelson Goodman in 1954 as a "riddle" about induction, a riddle which has been widely thought to cast doubt on the validity and rationality of induction. That unnecessary doubt in turn is…
The napkin problem was first posed by John H. Conway, and written up as a `toughie' in "Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection," by Peter Winkler. To paraphrase Winkler's book, there is a banquet dinner to be served at a…
There is a myth that Einstein's discovery of general relativity was due to his following beautiful mathematics to discover new insights about nature. I argue that this is an incorrect reading of the history and that what Einstein did was to…
Since its formulation by Sir Isaac Newton, the problem of solving the equations of motion for three bodies under their own gravitational force has remained practically unsolved. Currently, the solution for a given initialization can only be…
This paper frames calculus as a global, centuries-long development rather than a subject that began only with Newton and Leibniz. Drawing on ideas from Greek, Indian, Islamic, and later European mathematics, it highlights how concepts like…
We consider $n$-sided dice whose face values lie between $1$ and $n$ and whose faces sum to $n(n+1)/2$. For two dice $A$ and $B$, define $A \succ B$ if it is more likely for $A$ to show a higher face than $B$. Suppose $k$ such dice…
Professor Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994) was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, best known for his doctrine of falsifiability. His axiomatic formulation of probability, however, is unknown to current…
Invented by Kurt Hensel at the very end of 19th century on the model of power series in one indeterminate, the $p$-adic numbers have not only become an indispensable tool of contemporary arithmetic, but a research topic per se. In this…
In 1687 Isaac Newton published PHILOSOPHI\AE \ NATURALIS PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA, where the classical analytic dynamics was formulated. But Newton also formulated a discrete dynamics, which is the central difference algorithm, known as the…