As an invited contributor to this Festschrift honoring Alain Colmerauer, I feel compelled to give not only an account of his main research contributions, but also of my perspective on the motivations behind them. I hope that this will provide the reader with a glimpse of how a focused, tenacious, rigorous, and inventive mind like Alain’s picks research problems and proceeds to solve them. The h...

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...

There are no doubts. We owe wavelet analysis to Jean Morlet. How did Morlet discover wavelets? Here is the story. During the late seventies Morlet was working as a geophysicist for the Elf-Aquitaine company. He had to process the backscattered seismic signals which carry the information related to the geological layers. These seismic signals present transient patterns. Processing such signals w...

I met John in 1995. I had enrolled for the University of Manchester’s unique M.A. in History and Social Anthropology of Science, Technology and Medicine, which was jointly run by the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine and the Department of Social Anthropology. This degree was one of many interdisciplinary activities that John had initiated. Soon after my arrival, during ...

The editorial board of Cognitive Science had mixed emotions on hearing the news that Larry Erlbaum was selling Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (LEA) to Informa, parent company of Taylor and Francis. Larry has been an ardent supporter of the Cognitive Science Society since its inception. LEA has published the print version of the conference proceedings and since 2005 has been the publisher of the jo...

Giuseppe Moruzzi was born one century ago; he was an outstanding Italian neurophysiologist, who was particularly famous for his contributions to the study of the mechanisms underlying the control of the sleep-waking cycle in mammals. In 1990, Rita Levi-Montalcini, Moruzzi's great friend and admirer, used the occasion of an invitation by the University of Parma, where Moruzzi graduated in medici...

The question of the aggregation and disaggregation of political actors is essential for the understanding of the future of global politics, both in terms of international security affairs and international political economy. A model based upon tribute is presented to show how new political actors can emerge from an aggregation of smaller political actors. The tribute model provides an existence...