A Salute to My Colleague Yves Chauvin, 1930–2015

Salute to samarium.

Many years ago while studying for a degree in mineralogy, I was privileged to visit the Russian Ilmen Mountains, host to two minerals from which several rare-earth elements were discovered — monazite ((Ce, La, Nd, Th)PO4), and another mineral that was first described in 1839 by the German mineralogist Gustav Rose. He found uranium and tantalum in its composition and thus proposed the name urano...

Am I my brother's warden? Responding to the unethical or incompetent colleague.

The Clinton plan: a salute to American pluralism.

The strength of President Bill Clinton's health reform proposal lies in its commitment to universal, portable health insurance. To enhance the political appeal of his plan, however, the president has forged a compromise between two divergent ethical precepts: (1) that health care is a social good to be made available to all Americans, on equal terms, at a financial burden roughly proportional t...

Tribute to Jean - Yves Jaffray

It is very rare to find in a single person both the qualities of a remarkable scientific mind and of a wonderful human being. With this tribute to Jean-Yves Jaffray, we hope to convince the reader of his outstanding creativity and vision, of the coherence of his work, and of its relevance for some topics in decision theory that are currently under lively debate. As a scientist, Jean-Yves Jaffra...

About collagen, a tribute to Yves Bouligand.

Yves Bouligand's analysis of the organizations of biological materials in relation to those of liquid crystals enabled the development of the idea that physical forces exerting their actions under strong spatial constraints determine the structures and morphologies of these materials. The different levels of organization in collagen have preoccupied him for a long time. We present here our rece...