Mathematics

Blogs about mathematics

Freeman Dyson in 2007

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The physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson passed away yesterday, February 28. His daughter Mia confirmed the news explaining that her father got injured after falling in his office in Princeton last Wednesday and complications led to his death.

In addition to theoretical studies, Freeman Dyson pursued various technological projects starting with the Orion Project, which aimed to build a nuclear-powered rocket, and subsequently to a class of nuclear reactors called TRIGA (Training, Research, Isotopes, General Atomics) for the production of isotopes for medical use.

Over the years, Freeman Dyson wrote articles that proposed ideas and projects such as the Dyson sphere, a structure built to completely surround a star to use all the energy it emits, and the Dyson tree, a plant created by engineering genetics to grow on a comet useful to create space habitats in which it would generate oxygen. Recently he proposed a variant of this project with the idea of ​​creating plants that absorbed more carbon dioxide.

Portrait of Isaac Newton in 1689

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A manuscript by Isaac Newton came to light after having been part of a private collection for decades. This year it was purchased by the “Chemical Heritage Foundation” and will be made available online in a partnership with Indiana University and in particular its project “The Chymistry of Isaac Newton”. This manuscript is someway special because it’s about alchemy, a subject Newton was very interested about in the course of his life.

John von Neumann when he worked in Los Alamos

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Neumann János Lajos, this is his birth name, was born on December 28, 1903 in Budapest, in the then Austro-Hungarian Empire. John von Neumann developed mathematical applications in a variety of fields where there were many practical applications. His research concerned among other the Von Neumann-Bernays-Gödel (NBG) set theory, the ergodic theory, the von Neumann algebras and other fields which concerned sciences such as quantum mechanics. He’s also considered one of the fathers of computer science.

John McCarthy in 2006

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Yesterday John McCarthy died. He was one of the giants of computer science and cognitive science. He invented the concept of artificial intelligence and the Lisp language.