at Harvard University where he was a member of the Society of Fellows. But our real mathematical contact started when I visited him twice at the University of Wisconsin between 1941 and 1943 and where we obtained our first joint results. Then I met him in Santa Fe and Los Angeles in 1946. He had a serious

This paper was Hilbert's quick answer to those of his fellow mathematicians who harshly criticized the non-constructiveness of his first proof. The second paper contains the Nullstellensatz, the Hilbert-Mumford criterion

Lovelock, fellow himself of the Royal society, who is the paradigm of independent science – not only independence of thought but also of action. A chemist and inventor, James Lovelock, widely known as the fa-ther of the Gaia hypothesis, became fellow of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific

the following: Q: “What’s sour and yellow and equivalent to the axiom of choice?” A: “Zorn’s lemon!” While I knew that “Zorn ” was the name of a mathematician who proved an equivalent version of the Axiom of Choice, I didn’t know much aboutthe man Max Zorn until the late 1980s when a research colleague told me

—bootstrap resampling—is relatively young, but the story itself is a familiar one within the scientific community: a mathematician or a statistician conceives and formulates a theory that is first developed by fellow mathematicians and then brought to fame by other professionals, typically engineers, who point to many

In 1696 Johann Bernoulli issued a famous challenge to his fellow mathematicians: Given two points A and B in a vertical plane, find the curve con-necting the two points such that an object, starting with zero ve-locity at A, slides without friction along the curve to B in the least possible time

circumstances. Rebecca Goldstein, the MacArthur Foundation fellow and author of The Mind-Body Problem (a novel which seems to be quite popular among mathematicians) attempts an even more difficult task in her short new book

, including the first reviewed here.) He is also a serious research mathematician, working in dynamical systems with an emphasis on systems with symmetries; indeed, he was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1995 he won the Society’s Faraday Medal for his contributions

The particular focus of this workshop was on the combinatorial aspects of representation theory. It brought together senior mathematicians working in the representation theory of Kac-Moody algebras with students and postdoctoral fellows who are in the initial stages of their career in this field

lecture hall of the Newton Institute in Cambridge, England. Renowned physicists and mathematicians, often accompanied by their brightest graduate students, were sprinkled through the crowd. Around them pushed a mob of intellectual tourists—“town and gown”—spilling into the foyer and out the side