Vasconcelos of Mexico. Philosopher and Prophet

Fritz Heider : Philosopher and Psychologist

Fritz Heider was a wanderer, someone who liked to survey and take the measure of whatever he encountered. In his formative years, he was a wanderer in the geographical sense — hiking in his beloved Austrian mountains and traveling throughout much of Europe. In his professional years, he was a wanderer in the intellectual sense — taking daily walks for the purpose of analyzing a difficult concep...

Polymatroid Prophet Inequalities

Consider a gambler and a prophet who observe a sequence of independent, non-negative numbers. The gambler sees the numbers one-by-one whereas the prophet sees the entire sequence at once. The goal of both is to decide on fractions of each number they want to keep so as to maximize the weighted fractional sum of the numbers chosen. The classic result of Krengel and Sucheston (1977-78) asserts th...

Thomas Young, Natural Philosopher

Dr. Willmer's second edition of this little book fulfills his stated purpose ... to correlate some of the numerous fragments of scattered data which have so far been obtained and to orientate them in such a way as to illustrate the more fundamental contributions which the method has made to physiological knowledge, and to show the manner in which a change of outlook has already been brought abo...

Joseph Priestley, natural philosopher.

In this two hundredth anniversary year of his death, we are met to celebrate the life and career of Joseph Priestley—and most of us celebrate the wrong man, for the wrong reasons. We celebrate the pneumatic chemist who, in a flurry of random experiments made over a period of five years, isolated and partially identified nine new gases, including oxygen—and the man who spent roughly five times a...

Newton as Philosopher