Two epigraphic-historical notes

Historical notes

Historical notes on cancer.

CANCER means to us today 'malignant growth'. In spite of this specification it is a notion comparable in its vagueness and all-embracing character only to the expressions 'fever' or 'plague', as they were used four hundred years ago, the former embracing then such diverse diseases as malaria, typhus, or typhoid, the latter being applied to any kind ofdeadly epidemic, be it smallpox, bubonic pla...

Historical Notes on Hybrid Metaheuristics

1.1 INTRODUCTION Finding optimal solutions is in general computationally intractable for many com-binatorial optimization problems, e.g., those known as NP-hard [54]. The classical approach for dealing with this fact was the use of approximation algorithms, i.e., relaxing the goal from finding the optimal solution to obtaining solutions within some bounded distance from the former [61]. Unfortu...

Historical notes on loop theory

This paper deals with the origins and early history of loop theory, summarizing the period from the 1920s through the 1960s.

Historical notes on planet formation

The history of planet formation and detection is long and complicated, and numerous books and review articles have been written about it, e.g. Boss (1998a) and Brush (1990). In this introductory review, we concentrate on only a few specific aspects of the subject, under the general assumption that the Kant–Laplace nebular hypothesis provides the correct framework for planet formation. The first...