Operation: saving the MFO
As the Second World War drew to a close, the Allies began the task of tracking down German scientists. The main reason – with the onset of the Cold War already looming – was to […]
Month: March 2021
Bringing some order: Schrödinger’s wave mechanics
In several previous posts we have described how one part of Physics evolved, the one related to the microscopic world of atoms, their spectra, etc. Perhaps the two most surprising results we have seen were […]
Interfaculty Championship
The workings: The origin of the Universiade (do not look this word up in a dictionary, you better combine the words University and Olympiad to get its meaning) goes back to the inter-war period. The […]
Solution: Interfaculty championship
We publish the solution to the divertimento Interfaculty Championship. The fun: Three faculties, Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, participated in a university sports championship. Each had one participant in each event. Isabel, a student from the […]
A twelve-second flight: towards Langlands’ conjectures
Laurent Fargues (CNRS, France) and Peter Scholze (University of Bonn, Germany) made a preprint entitled Geometrization of the local Langlands correspondence available to the mathematical community on 26 February. This title announces what had been […]
Infallibility (by H. Poincaré)
There can be little doubt that Henri Poincaré was one of the great mathematicians of the second part of the 19th century, with important contributions in almost all areas. He was also a physicist (and […]
Floating bodies
Archimedes on floating bodies One of Archimedes’ works deals with floating bodies. It came as a great surprise to me when I read the second proposition of this work of Archimedes: Proposition 2. The surface […]