Marian Pour-El
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Marian Pour-El
Marian Boykan Pour-El (April 29, 1928 – June 10, 2009) was an American mathematical logician who did pioneering work in computable analysis. Early life and education Marian Boykan was born in 1928 in New York City; her parents were dentist Joseph Boykan and his wife Matilda (Mattie, née Caspe), a former laboratory technician and housewife. As a young girl, she performed ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House, and this influenced her later life where she was often more comfortable speaking before large audiences than in small groups. Although she wanted to attend the Bronx High School of Science, it was at that time only for boys; instead, she went to a girls' school, Hunter College High School. Her parents were unwilling to pay the tuition for private college for her, so she went to Hunter College, an inexpensive local higher-education establishment primarily aimed at training schoolteachers. There she earned a bachelor's degree in physics in 1949. She also completed enough co ...
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Mathematical Logic
Mathematical logic is the study of logic, formal logic within mathematics. Major subareas include model theory, proof theory, set theory, and recursion theory. Research in mathematical logic commonly addresses the mathematical properties of formal systems of logic such as their expressive or deductive power. However, it can also include uses of logic to characterize correct mathematical reasoning or to establish foundations of mathematics. Since its inception, mathematical logic has both contributed to and been motivated by the study of foundations of mathematics. This study began in the late 19th century with the development of axiomatic frameworks for geometry, arithmetic, and Mathematical analysis, analysis. In the early 20th century it was shaped by David Hilbert's Hilbert's program, program to prove the consistency of foundational theories. Results of Kurt Gödel, Gerhard Gentzen, and others provided partial resolution to the program, and clarified the issues involved in pr ...
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William Alvin Howard
William Alvin Howard (born 1926) is a proof theorist best known for his work demonstrating formal similarity between intuitionistic logic and the simply typed lambda calculus that has come to be known as the Curry–Howard correspondence. He has also been active in the theory of proof-theoretic ordinals. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1956 for his dissertation "k-fold recursion and well-ordering". He was a student of Saunders Mac Lane. The Howard ordinal (also known as the Bachmann–Howard ordinal) was named after him. He was elected to the 2018 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society. References External linksEntry for ''William Alvin Howard''at the Mathematics Genealogy Project The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a web-based database for the academic genealogy of mathematicians.. By 31 December 2021, it contained information on 274,575 mathematical scientists who contributed to research-level mathematics. For a ty .... * 2 ...
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Smooth Function
In mathematical analysis, the smoothness of a function (mathematics), function is a property measured by the number of Continuous function, continuous Derivative (mathematics), derivatives it has over some domain, called ''differentiability class''. At the very minimum, a function could be considered smooth if it is differentiable everywhere (hence continuous). At the other end, it might also possess derivatives of all Order of derivation, orders in its Domain of a function, domain, in which case it is said to be infinitely differentiable and referred to as a C-infinity function (or C^ function). Differentiability classes Differentiability class is a classification of functions according to the properties of their derivatives. It is a measure of the highest order of derivative that exists and is continuous for a function. Consider an open set U on the real line and a function f defined on U with real values. Let ''k'' be a non-negative integer. The function f is said to be of ...
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Church–Turing Thesis
In computability theory, the Church–Turing thesis (also known as computability thesis, the Turing–Church thesis, the Church–Turing conjecture, Church's thesis, Church's conjecture, and Turing's thesis) is a thesis about the nature of computable functions. It states that a function on the natural numbers can be calculated by an effective method if and only if it is computable by a Turing machine. The thesis is named after American mathematician Alonzo Church and the British mathematician Alan Turing. Before the precise definition of computable function, mathematicians often used the informal term effectively calculable to describe functions that are computable by paper-and-pencil methods. In the 1930s, several independent attempts were made to formalize the notion of computability: * In 1933, Kurt Gödel, with Jacques Herbrand, formalized the definition of the class of general recursive functions: the smallest class of functions (with arbitrarily many arguments) that is cl ...
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The Emperor's New Mind
''The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics'' is a 1989 book by the mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose. Penrose argues that human consciousness is non-algorithmic, and thus is not capable of being modeled by a conventional Turing machine, which includes a digital computer. Penrose hypothesizes that quantum mechanics plays an essential role in the understanding of human consciousness. The Wave function collapse, collapse of the quantum wavefunction is seen as playing an important role in brain function. Most of the book is spent reviewing, for the scientifically-minded lay-reader, a plethora of interrelated subjects such as Newtonian physics, special relativity, special and general relativity, the philosophy and limitations of mathematics, quantum physics, physical cosmology, cosmology, and the nature of time. Penrose intermittently describes how each of these bears on his developing theme: that consciousness is not "algorithmic". Only the ...
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Roger Penrose
Sir Roger Penrose (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford, an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge and University College London. Penrose has contributed to the mathematical physics of general relativity and cosmology. He has received several prizes and awards, including the 1988 Wolf Prize in Physics, which he shared with Stephen Hawking for the Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems, and one half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity". He is regarded as one of the greatest living physicists, mathematicians and scientists, and is particularly noted for the breadth and depth of his work in both natural and formal sciences. Early life and education Bor ...
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Undecidable Problem
In computability theory and computational complexity theory, an undecidable problem is a decision problem for which it is proved to be impossible to construct an algorithm that always leads to a correct yes-or-no answer. The halting problem is an example: it can be proven that there is no algorithm that correctly determines whether arbitrary programs eventually halt when run. Background A decision problem is any arbitrary yes-or-no question on an infinite set of inputs. Because of this, it is traditional to define the decision problem equivalently as the set of inputs for which the problem returns ''yes''. These inputs can be natural numbers, but also other values of some other kind, such as strings of a formal language. Using some encoding, such as a Gödel numbering, the strings can be encoded as natural numbers. Thus, a decision problem informally phrased in terms of a formal language is also equivalent to a set of natural numbers. To keep the formal definition simple, it is ...
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Wave Equation
The (two-way) wave equation is a second-order linear partial differential equation for the description of waves or standing wave fields — as they occur in classical physics — such as mechanical waves (e.g. water waves, sound waves and seismic waves) or electromagnetic waves (including light waves). It arises in fields like acoustics, electromagnetism, and fluid dynamics. Single mechanical or electromagnetic waves propagating in a pre-defined direction can also be described with the first-order one-way wave equation which is much easier to solve and also valid for inhomogenious media. Introduction The (two-way) wave equation is a second-order partial differential equation describing waves, including traveling and standing waves; the latter can be considered as linear superpositions of waves traveling in opposite directions. This article mostly focuses on the scalar wave equation describing waves in scalars by scalar functions of a time variable (a variable repres ...
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Initial Condition
In mathematics and particularly in dynamic systems, an initial condition, in some contexts called a seed value, is a value of an evolving variable at some point in time designated as the initial time (typically denoted ''t'' = 0). For a system of order ''k'' (the number of time lags in discrete time, or the order of the largest derivative in continuous time) and dimension ''n'' (that is, with ''n'' different evolving variables, which together can be denoted by an ''n''-dimensional coordinate vector), generally ''nk'' initial conditions are needed in order to trace the system's variables forward through time. In both differential equations in continuous time and difference equations in discrete time, initial conditions affect the value of the dynamic variables (state variables) at any future time. In continuous time, the problem of finding a closed form solution for the state variables as a function of time and of the initial conditions is called the initial value p ...
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Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American people, American mathematician, electrical engineering, electrical engineer, and cryptography, cryptographer known as a "father of information theory". As a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he wrote A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical numerical relationship. Shannon contributed to the field of cryptanalysis for national defense of the United States during World War II, including his fundamental work on codebreaking and secure telecommunications. Biography Childhood The Shannon family lived in Gaylord, Michigan, and Claude was born in a hospital in nearby Petoskey, Michigan, Petoskey. His father, Claude Sr. (1862–1934), was a businessman and for a while, a judge of probate in Gaylord. His mother, Mabel Wolf Shannon (1890–1945), ...
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Algebraic Differential Equation
In mathematics, an algebraic differential equation is a differential equation that can be expressed by means of differential algebra. There are several such notions, according to the concept of differential algebra used. The intention is to include equations formed by means of differential operators, in which the coefficients are rational functions of the variables (e.g. the hypergeometric equation). Algebraic differential equations are widely used in computer algebra and number theory. A simple concept is that of a polynomial vector field, in other words a vector field expressed with respect to a standard co-ordinate basis as the first partial derivatives with polynomial coefficients. This is a type of first-order algebraic differential operator. Formulations *Derivations ''D'' can be used as algebraic analogues of the formal part of differential calculus, so that algebraic differential equations make sense in commutative rings. *The theory of differential fields was set u ...
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Analog Computer
An analog computer or analogue computer is a type of computer that uses the continuous variation aspect of physical phenomena such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities (''analog signals'') to model the problem being solved. In contrast, digital computers represent varying quantities symbolically and by discrete values of both time and amplitude (digital signals). Analog computers can have a very wide range of complexity. Slide rules and nomograms are the simplest, while naval gunfire control computers and large hybrid digital/analog computers were among the most complicated. Complex mechanisms for process control and protective relays used analog computation to perform control and protective functions. Analog computers were widely used in scientific and industrial applications even after the advent of digital computers, because at the time they were typically much faster, but they started to become obsolete as early as the 1950s and 1960s, although they remaine ...
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