Progressive Discipline: An Oxymoron?

Image Reproduction: An Oxymoron

In our daily lives dealing with images, we have the mental notion that we are reproducing an original. This notion is generally helpful in guiding image and colour processing decisions, but often it turns into a hindrance when the words we use lead to artifi cial constraints that we impose onto the problem. This paper describes some scenarios in which a broader defi nition of the word ‘reproduc...

Design Research, an Oxymoron?

Preconditioned Eigensolvers—an Oxymoron?

A short survey of some results on preconditioned iterative methods for symmetric eigenvalue problems is presented. The survey is by no means complete and reflects the author’s personal interests and biases, with emphasis on author’s own contributions. The author surveys most of the important theoretical results and ideas which have appeared in the Soviet literature, adding references to work pu...

Human nature: an oxymoron?

The concept of human nature played an important role in the Aristotelian attempt to characterize the specific difference of humans from other animals and serves as a normative guide. But with the positivistic turn in the modern conception of nature and the denaturalization of reason (typically since Kant), the essential characteristic of human beings can no more be thought of as "natural". The ...

“mathematical Social Sciences;” an Oxymoron?

Be honest. Deep down, most mathematicians probably accept “mathematical social sciences” as an oxymoron. I did — until after examining this area more seriously. Comfortable in my own research emphasizing the Newtonian N -body problem, I probably would respond to news that someone was working in, say, mathematical economics with a polite, “That’s nice,” where this noncommittal comment carried th...