Articles with MATHSN identifiers

Andrew Russell Forsyth, FRS, FRSE (18 June 1858, Glasgow – 2 June 1942, South Kensington) was a British mathematician.

Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (French pronunciation: [ʒozɛf ɑ̃twan fɛʁdinɑ̃ plato]; 14 October 1801 – 15 September 1883) was a Belgian physicist and mathematician. He was one of the first people to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image. To do this, he used counterrotating disks with repeating drawn images in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the other. He called this device of 1832 the phenakistiscope.

Leonard Emanuel Parker (born Leonard Pearlman; in 1938) is a distinguished professor emeritus of physics and a former director of the Center for Gravitation and Cosmology at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. During the late 1960s, Parker established a new area of physics—quantum field theory in curved spacetime. Specifically, by applying the technique of Bogoliubov transformations to quantum field theory with a changing gravitational field, he discovered the physical mechanism now known as cosmological particle production. His breakthrough discovery has a surprising consequence: the expansion of the universe can create particles out of the vacuum.
His work inspired research by hundreds of physicists and has been cited in more than 2,000 research papers; it was credited in the memoirs of Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov and helped Stephen Hawking discover the creation of particles by black holes.Along with David Toms of Newcastle University, Parker co-wrote a latest addition to graduate-level textbooks on quantum field theory in curved spacetime, entitled Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime: Quantized Fields and Gravity (Cambridge University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-521-87787-9).
He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1967. His advisor was Sidney Coleman.

Herman Kahn (February 15, 1922 – July 7, 1983) was an American physicist and a founding member of the Hudson Institute, regarded as one of the preeminent futurists of the latter part of the twentieth century. He originally came to prominence as a military strategist and systems theorist while employed at the RAND Corporation. He analyzed the likely consequences of nuclear war and recommended ways to improve survivability during the Cold War. Kahn posited the idea of a "winnable" nuclear exchange in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War for which he was one of the historical inspirations for the title character of Stanley Kubrick's classic black comedy film satire Dr. Strangelove. In his commentary for Fail Safe, director Sidney Lumet remarked that the Professor Groeteschele character is also based on Herman Kahn.
Kahn's theories contributed to the development of the nuclear strategy of the United States.

André-Louis Danjon (French: [ɑ̃dʁelwi dɑ̃ʒɔ̃]; 6 April 1890 – 21 April 1967) was a French astronomer born in Caen to Louis Dominique Danjon and Marie Justine Binet.Danjon devised a method to measure "earthshine" on the Moon using a telescope in which a prism split the Moon's image into two identical side-by-side images. By adjusting a diaphragm to dim one of the images until the sunlit portion had the same apparent brightness as the earthlit portion on the unadjusted image, he could quantify the diaphragm adjustment, and thus had a real measurement for the brightness of earthshine. He recorded the measurements using his method (now known as the Danjon scale, on which zero equates to a barely visible Moon) from 1925 until the 1950s.
Among his notable contributions to astronomy was the design of the impersonal (prismatic) astrolabe based on an earlier prismatic astrolabe developed by François Auguste Claude which is now known as the Danjon astrolabe, which led to an improvement in the accuracy of fundamental optical astrometry. An account of this instrument, and of the results of some early years of its operation, are given in Danjon's 1958 George Darwin Lecture to the Royal Astronomical Society.He also developed the "Danjon limit", a proposed measure of the minimum angular separation between the Sun and the Moon at which a lunar crescent is visible. However, this limit may not exist.
He was Director of the Observatory of Strasbourg from 1930 to 1945 and of the Paris Observatory from 1945 to 1963.Danjon was the President of the Société astronomique de France (SAF), the French astronomical society, during two periods: 1947–49 and 1962–64.He was awarded the Prix Jules Janssen of the Société astronomique de France in 1950, and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1958.
Danjon died in 1967 in Suresnes, Hauts-de-Seine.

Prof Hyman Levy (28 February 1889 – 27 February 1975) was a Scottish-Jewish philosopher, Emeritus Professor of Imperial College London, mathematician, political activist and fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Luitzen Egbertus Jan "Bertus" Brouwer (27 February 1881 – 2 December 1966) was a Dutch mathematician and philosopher who worked in topology, set theory, measure theory and complex analysis. He is seen as one of the founders of modern topology, in particular through his establishing the fixed-point theorem and the topological invariance of dimension.Brouwer also became a major figure in the philosophy of intuitionism, a constructivist school of mathematics which argues that math is a cognitive construct rather than a type of objective truth. This position led to the Brouwer–Hilbert controversy, in which Brouwer sparred with his formalist colleague David Hilbert. Brouwer's ideas were subsequently taken up by his student Arend Heyting and Hilbert's former student Hermann Weyl. In addition to his mathematical work, Brouwer also published the short philosophical tract Life, Art, and Mysticism (1905).

René Maurice Fréchet (French: [ʁəne mɔʁis fʁeʃɛ, moʁ-]; 2 September 1878 – 4 June 1973) was a French mathematician. He made major contributions to general topology and was the first to define metric spaces. He also made several important contributions to the field of statistics and probability, as well as calculus. His dissertation opened the entire field of functionals on metric spaces and introduced the notion of compactness. Independently of Riesz, he discovered the representation theorem in the space of Lebesgue square integrable functions. He is often referred to as the founder of the theory of abstract spaces.

Ernest Benjamin Esclangon (17 March 1876 – 28 January 1954) was a French astronomer and mathematician.
Born in Mison, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, in 1895 he started to study mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure, graduating in 1898. Looking for some means of financial support while he completed his doctorate on quasi-periodic functions, he took a post at the Bordeaux Observatory, teaching some mathematics at the university.
During World War I, he worked on ballistics and developed a novel method for precisely locating enemy artillery. When a gun is fired, it initiates a spherical shock wave but the projectile also generates a conical wave. By using the sound of distant guns to compare the two waves, Escaglon was able to make accurate predictions of gun locations.
After the armistice in 1919, Esclangon became director of the Strasbourg Observatory and professor of astronomy at the university the following year. In 1929, he was appointed director of the Paris Observatory and of the International Time Bureau, and elected to the Bureau des Longitudes in 1932. He is perhaps best remembered for initiating in 1933 the first speaking clock service, reportedly to relieve the observatory staff from the numerous telephone calls requesting the exact time. He was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1939.
Esclangon was the President of the Société astronomique de France (SAF), the French astronomical society, from 1933–1935. In 1935, he received the Prix Jules Janssen, the society's highest award.
Serving as director of the Paris Observatory throughout World War II and the German occupation of Paris, he retired in 1944. He died in Eyrenville, France.
The binary asteroid 1509 Esclangona is named after him.
The lunar crater Esclangon is named after him.
His doctoral students include Daniel Barbier, Édmée Chandon, Louis Couffignal, André-Louis Danjon, and Nicolas Stoyko.

Félix Édouard Justin Émile Borel (French: [bɔʁɛl]; 7 January 1871 – 3 February 1956) was a French mathematician and politician. As a mathematician, he was known for his founding work in the areas of measure theory and probability.