相关论文: Michel Henon, a playfull and simplifying mind
It has long been known that scientific output proceeds on an exponential increase, or more properly, a logistic growth curve. The interplay between effort and discovery is clear, and the nature of the functional form has been thought to be…
Times magazine selected Albert Einstein, the German born Jewish Scientist as the person of the 20th century. Undoubtedly, 20th century was the age of science and Einstein's contributions in unraveling mysteries of nature was unparalleled.…
Complexity is a multi-faceted phenomenon, involving a variety of features including disorder, nonlinearity, and self-organisation. We use a recently developed rigorous framework for complexity to understand measures of complexity. We…
Children can take many paths to become scientists. But they undoubtedly include the following steps Play, play and play; Observe; Ask (themselves). In this paper I will talk about some of my experiences teaching girls and boys, teenagers…
Until this century, the number of working female scientists has been indeterminate. Prevailing wisdom indicates that women, historically, have not excelled in the mathematics and sciences, for various reasons. These range from societal…
Enormous questions still loom for the emerging science of spontaneous thought: what, exactly, is spontaneous thought? Why does our brain engage in spontaneous forms of thinking, and when is this most likely to occur? And perhaps the…
The tremendous advances of research into artificial intelligence as well as neuroscience made over the last two to three decades have given further support to a renewed interest into philosophical discussions of the mind-body problem.…
Two of the major achievements of Stephen Hawking are described in elementary terms. They are his work on the beginning of the universe and his work on the end of black holes. These are perhaps the scientific achievements for which he is…
What science does, what science could do, and how to make science work? If we want to know the answers to these questions, we need to be able to uncover the mechanisms of science, going beyond metrics that are easily collectible and…
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…
Scientific conferences play an important part in every scientists career. Here, I suggest an approach that can mitigate biases and help make scientific conferences more inclusive for everybody by increasing the transparency in speaker…
In the first edition of this Handbook, two remarkable chapters consider seemingly distinct yet deeply connected subjects ...
This is an essay about understanding complexity science, via some peculiarities of the field, as a meeting place for a special kind of scientist. It comes out of my hobby of reading popular-science complex systems books, and builds on notes…
Fifteen years after the discovery of dynamical friction by Chandrasekhar, Michel Henon attempts to solve the longstanding problem of the divergence of the friction suffered by the perturber and caused by the most distant cluster stars. His…
We claim that human mathematics is only a limited part of the consequences of the chosen basic axioms. Properly human mathematics varies with time but appears to have universal features which we try to analyze. In particular the functioning…
The paper attempts to describe the space of possible mind designs by first equating all minds to software. Next it proves some interesting properties of the mind design space such as infinitude of minds, size and representation complexity…
This is a former PhD student's take on his teacher's scientific philosophy. I describe a set of 'principles' that I believe are conducive to good applied mathematics, and that I have learnt myself from observing Hans van Duijn in action.
The article is an historical overview of some of the major contributions from different areas of Science with which, for centuries, it has been built up a scientific, sound and consistent vision of the atom. Some experiments that led us to…
The constantly growing body of scholarly knowledge of science, technology, and humanities is an asset of the mankind. While new discoveries expand the existing knowledge, they may simultaneously render some of it obsolete. It is crucial for…
The fact that the author of an excellent textbook on electromagnetism could be duped by "hidden momentum" vividly illustrates the problematic nature of its use.