Settling Multiple Debts Efficiently: An Invitation to Computing Science

Settling Multiple Debts Efficiently: An Invitation to Computing Science

I present and solve several problems related to the settling of multiple debts. The solutions are documented in much detail, with (bright) high-school students in mind. One of the variants has a simple solution, though it is not so easy to code concisely. Another variant is an elegant NP-hard problem. The problem leads into important areas of mathematics and computing science, making it suitabl...

An Invitation to Cognitive Science

An Invitation to Qualitative Computing

This report is Chapter 1 in the author’s book Qualitative Computing: A computational journey into non linearity published by World Scientific, Singapore (2011). It presents an historical survey of the evolution of mathematical computation since Sumer four millennia ago. It shows how the laws of logic have evolved in the mind of mathematicians. This evolution has been driven by three major ideas...

Multiple Scattering: an Invitation∗

Multiple scattering is an important and interesting topic, of relevance in a wide variety of physical contexts. In this short paper, we attempt to review some of the theory and applications with the aim of encouraging further investigations. For simplicity, we consider the scattering of two-dimensional time-harmonic acoustic waves by hard parallel cylinders. Methods described include separation...

Editorial: Climate Science: An Invitation for Physicists.

Climate science is rooted in physics and in many of the methods used by physicists. Although it’s a cliché to say that the practice of science changed dramatically with the advent of the digital age, computers have had an enormous impact on the growth and evolution of climate science. Before computing, progress in explaining observations or making predictions in the physical sciences, including...