Physical Sciences

MAIN PUBLICATIONS
(i) Monographs
Pell's equation. (Russian) Tbilisi, 1952, pp. 90.
Gitterpunkte in mehrdimensionalen Kugeln. Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, Warszawa, 1957, pp. 471.
Lattice points in many-dimensional spheres. (Russian) Publ. Academy of Sci., Tbilisi, 1960, pp. 460.
Weylsche Exponentialsummen in der neueren Zahlentheorie. VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1963, pp. 231. vskip+0.3cm

PDF Biography of Andrei Weil

For the mathematical community, Kustaa Inkeri is the author of significant papers on number theory, especially on topics related to Fermat's Last Theorem. Finnish mathematicians know Inkeri as the founder of the school of number theory in Finland. At the University of Turku, many of us still think of Inkeri as the Head of the Mathematics Department, a position he held for about 20 years.
The present contribution is intended to give a picture of the man behind these achievements. So this is an essay expressly about the person of a mathematician and no attempt will be made to describe or sum up Inkeri's mathematical work. For an appreciation of the latter the reader is asked to take advantage of the rich material in the rest of this volume.

An unusual and attractive edition of Euclid was published in 1847 in England, edited by an otherwise unknown mathematician named Oliver Byrne. It covers the first 6 books of Euclid, which range through most of elementary plane geometry and the theory of proportions. What distinguishes Byrne's edition is that he attempts to present Euclid's proofs in terms of pictures, using as little text - and in particular as few labels - as possible. What makes the book especially striking is his use of colour.

Kurt Mahler was born on 26 July 1903 at Krefeld am Rhein in Germany; he died in his 85th year on 26 February 1988 in Canberra, Australia. From 1933 onwards most of his life was spent outside of Germany, but his mathematical roots remained in the great school of mathematics that existed in Germany between the two world wars. Above all Mahler lived for mathematics; he took great pleasure in lecturing, researching and writing. It was no surprise that he remained active in research until the last days of his life. He was never a narrow specialist and had a remarkably broad and thorough knowledge of large parts of current and past mathematical research. At the same time he was oblivious to mathematical fashion, and very much followed his own path through the world of mathematics, uncovering new and simple ideas in many directions. In this way he made major contributions to transcendental number theory, diophantine approximation, p-adic analysis, and the geometry of numbers. Towards the end of his life, Kurt Mahler wrote a considerable amount about his own experiences; see 'Fifty years as a mathematician', 'How I became a mathematician', 'Warum ich eine besondere Vorliebe fur die Mathematik habe', 'Fifty years as a mathematician II'. There is also a recent excellent account of his life and work by Cassels (J.W.S. Cassels, 1991, 'Obituary of Kurt Mahler', Acta Arith. (3), 58, 215-228). In preparing this memoir we have freely used these sources. We have also drawn on our knowledge of and conversations with Mahler, whom we first met when we were undergraduates in Australia in the early 1960s.

This site contains a list of the most important people who have contributed to the development of chemistry. It is planned to include a biography with the most important details of their life and their scientific contribution. The list is chronological by the date of birth. To locate someone on the list, the browser's 'find' function can be used.

ILEJ, the "Internet Library of Early Journals" was a joint project by the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford, conducted under the auspices of the eLib (Electronic Libraries) Programme. It aimed to digitise substantial runs of 18th and 19th century journals, and make these images available on the Internet, together with their associated bibliographic data. The project finished in 1999, and no additional material will be added. See Final Report for conclusions of the project.
The core collection for the project are runs of at least 20 consecutive years of:
Three 18th-century journals Three 19th-century journals
Gentleman's Magazine
The Annual Register
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
Notes and Queries
The Builder
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine

The ashes of Marie Curie and her husband Pierre have now been laid to rest under the famous dome of the Panthéon, in Paris, alongside the author Victor Hugo, the politician Jean Jaurès and the Resistance fighter Jean Moulin. Through her discovery of radium, Marie Curie paved the way for nuclear physics and cancer therapy. Born of Polish parents, she was a woman of science and courage, compassionate yet stubbornly determined. Her research work was to cost her her life.

Ancient Greeks struggled to understand the nature of matter
Empedocles (around 490 to 444 BC) thought there were four original elements: Earth, Air, Fire, Water. He thought everything else came about through their combination and/or separation by the two opposite principles of Love and Strife.
Leucippus (around 460 to 420 BC) and Democritus (around 460 to 370 BC), supposedly a pupil of Leucippus, are considered the founders of atomism. Leucippus regarded atoms as imperceptible, individual particles that differ only in shape and position.
Plato (about 427 to 347 BC) in his work, the Timaeus, proposes a mathematical construction of the elements - earth, air, fire, water. Each of these elements is said to consist of particles or primary bodies. Each particle is a regular geometrical solid- the cube, tetrahedron, octahedron and icosahedron. Each of these particles is composed of simple right triangles. The particles are like the molecules of the theory; the triangles are its atoms.
Plato's beliefs as regards the universe were that the stars, planets, Sun and Moon move round the Earth in crystalline spheres. The sphere of the Moon was closest to the Earth, then the sphere of the Sun, then Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and furthest away was the sphere of the stars. He believed that the Moon shines by reflected sunlight.