By the time of his death in 1957 at the modest age of 53, the Hungarian polymath had not only revolutionized several subfields of mathematics and physics but also made foundational contributions to pure economics and statistics and taken key parts in the invention of the atomic b … | Continue reading
Mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr (1928-2015). was born in Bluefield, West Virginia in 1928. He died in a car crash in New Jersey on the 23rd of May, 2015, on his way back home after receiving the renowned | Continue reading
The published version of a talk by mathematician David Hilbert (1862-1943), dated the 20th of November 1915 is entitled ‘Die Grundlagen der Physik’ (“On the Foundations of Physics”). It was held five days before Einstein’s momentous paper ‘Die Feldgleichungen der Gravitation’ (“T … | Continue reading
«You don’t understand “ordinary people”. To you they are “stupid fools”» | Continue reading
Einstein had three children with his first wife Mileva Marić. Their names were Lieserl, Hans Albert and Eduard. Like his father, Hans Albert obtained a Ph.D. and worked as a professor, albeit in technical sciences. Hans Albert and his wife Frieda Knecht (whom his father disapprov … | Continue reading
In May of 1932, a viciously anti-Semetic illustrated brochure entitled Juden Sehen Dich An (“Jews are Watching You”) featured Einstein in its prologue alongside some sixty other prominant (alleged and actual) Jewish intellectuals (Robinson, 2019a p. 225). Written by a close colla … | Continue reading
Historians of science sometimes lament the fact certain historical figures are famous for the wrong reasons. Alan Turing (1912-54) is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon. Most people associate Turing with the breaking of an encryption device called the | Continue reading
In public choice economics, the median voter theorem states that “In a majority rule voting system, the candidate/party most preferred by the median voter will be elected”. In other words, the favorite candidate of the person in the middle of the probability distribution picks th … | Continue reading
When Albert Einstein and his wife Elsa left Germany in December of 1932, Einstein for a period believed that he might be able to return one day, but he wasn’t certain. As late as December he wrote his friend Maurice Solovine (1875-1958) to “send copies” of his newly republished … | Continue reading
If asset prices in the short term show an identifiable pattern, won’t speculators find this pattern and exploit it, thereby eliminating it? | Continue reading
The Martians of Budapest”, sometimes referred to as simply “The Martians” is a colloquial term used to describe a group of prominent Hungarian physicists and mathematicians who emigrated to the United States following the Great Purge of 1933. The term refers to—what appeared, fro … | Continue reading
Mathematician Alexander Grothendieck was born in 1928 to anarchist parents who left him to spend the majority of his formative years with foster parents. His father was murdered in Auschwitz. As his mother was detained, he grew up stateless, hiding from the Gestapo in occupied Fr … | Continue reading
The “most intelligent photograph ever taken”, as it is sometimes known, was captured during the Fifth Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Photons held in 1927 in Brussels, Belgium. The photograph is famous because it was captured at the outset of what would later be … | Continue reading
Unlike his collaborator John von Neumann (1903-57), economist Oskar Morgenstern (1902-77)’s name today remains synonymous with more-or-less a single work: the book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior* which the two co-authored in the war years from 1940-44. Morgenstern—an econo … | Continue reading
“When we met, was I walking to the faculty club or away from it? I’m wondering, because in the latter case I’ve already had my lunch” American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) was by all accounts, a very peculiar man. After graduating from high school at 11 years old, he … | Continue reading
Poincaré began working on what is now considered to be the foundation of topology and algebraic topology in the 1890s with the work Analysis Situs (1895) and five later supplements (1899; 1900, 1902a, 1902b, 1904). | Continue reading
The year is 1905. Newly graduated with a Ph.D. in physics, Albert Einstein publishes the paper Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichttspunkt (“On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light”). In it, … | Continue reading
Following Kurt Gödel (1906-1978)’s publications on the first- and second incompleteness theorems (1931) and later work on Cantor’s continuum hypothesis (1947), Gödel in 1948 turned his attention to cosmology. In an extensive investigation of Einstein’s field equations, Gödel foun … | Continue reading
As a child he collected rocks, wrote poetry and studied French literature. Never weighing more than 130 pounds, throughout his life he was a “tall and thin chainsmoker” who once stated that he “needed physics more than friends” who at Cambridge University was nearly charged with … | Continue reading
This issue narrates Norbert Wiener’s chance encounter with Albert Einstein in his own words as recounted to his sister Bertha in 1925. At the time of his writing of the letter Wiener was on one of his frequent trips around Europe, traveling from Leipzig to Geneva. Wiener had been … | Continue reading
About six weeks before he submitted his doctoral thesis at the University of Zürich in 1905, Einstein on March 18th submitted the paper Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichttspunkt (“On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Product … | Continue reading
“Beyond the way they speak, there is only one (no two!) features of American life which I find really tiresome. The impossibility of getting a bath in the ordinary sense and their ideas on room temperature” - Alan Turing | Continue reading
"The job entailed such onerous duties that only someone with an iron constitution could survive. My constitution, it so happened, was not made by iron. It was made of reeds and bamboo sticks" | Continue reading
Hungarian polymath John von Neumann (1903–1957) once wrote that Kurt Gödel was “absolutely irreplaceable” and “in a class by himself”. Describing his 1931 proof of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, von Neumann called the achievement“Singular and monumental — indeed it is more than … | Continue reading