On-line papers
Here is the directory containing my papers listed
below together, in some cases, with their plain TeX source files.
Reflections on retirement
A slightly mangled version of this brief note
appeared with a different title in the Spring 2013 issue of Fine Letters, published by the Princeton
mathematics department. Several people did not get the point about the anecdote of Stanley Jordan's comment.
If more undergraduates greeted new ideas with such wonder and eagerness, faculty would be clamoring to teach
undergraduates.
Review of stochastic mechanics
Slides for a talk at the 2011 conference on
Emergent Quantum Mechanics.
The paper is here.
Il potere del paradosso
A power point presentation in connection
with the exhibit From one to infinity. At the heart of mathematics, with
a video in Italian
at the Rimini Meeting, August 2010, together with notes
(also in Italian). And here is a video of a panel discussion I was in.
Warning signs of a possible collapse of contemporary mathematics
A paper given at a meeting of mathematicians, philosophers, scientists,
and theologians in San Marino, August 2006. A very heavily edited version appears as Chapter 3 of
the conference proceedings: Infinity: New Research Frontiers, Michael Heller and W. Hugh Woodin, eds.,
Cambridge University Press, 2011.
A talk for a general audience
An untitled talk given in January, 2009, at the
Crossroads Cultural Center.
Review of 18 Unconventional Essays on the Nature of Mathematics
A review of the book edited by Reuben Hersh,
which appeared in the November 2007 issue of the
American Mathematical Monthly.
Hilbert's Mistake
Here are the slides for a talk given at
the Second New York Graduate Student Logic Conference,
March 18, 2007.
L'infinito nell'aritmetica
A portion of a talk,
in pdf format with links, given in Italian at the
Rimini Meeting 2006.
The mystery of stochastic mechanics
These are notes, in a large font for
transparencies, of a talk pointing out two defects in stochastic
mechanics.
The mystery is how a theory with such a natural and appealing derivation
can be so right and yet so wrong. I do not understand this.
For more on stochastic mechanics, see Quantum Fluctuations
and the references therein; also Dynamical Theories of Brownian Motion.
Infinity
A talk, Completed versus Incomplete Infinity
in Arithmetic, addressed to non-mathematicians, for the conference
on
Infinity in Science, Philosophy, and Theology, Pontifical Lateran
University, Vatican City, November 9-11, 2005 -- also in
Italian.
Book Review
A review of Dennis Hesseling's
"Gnomes in the Fog: The Reception of Brouwer's Intuitionism
in the 1920s", in the Bulletin of the American
Mathematical Society. The expository paper mentioned in the
review is Understanding Intuitionism.
Syntax and Semantics
This is a paper that I will give at the
International Symposium "Foundations and the Ontological
Quest" to be held at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome,
January 7--10. An almost identical talk was given at the
international conference
Il problema
dei fondamenti oggi held in Mendrisio, Switzerland, on
November 16, 2001.
Mathematics and Faith
I was asked to give a
paper
(or pdf format)
on this topic at the
Jubilee for Men and Women from the World of Learning,
held at the Vatican, 23-24 May 2000.
Mathematics and the Mind
Text of a talk
(or pdf format)
at the Tokyo conference
Toward a Science of Consciousness -- Fundamental Approaches,
Tokyo, May 25-28, 1999.
Understanding Intuitionism
This is a paper
(or pdf format)
presented at the
Rencontre du
Reseau Georges Reeb, March 24-28, 1997.
Debate
In November 1995, Ennio De Giorgi and I gave lectures at
the University of Rome "La Sapienza" and then debated the foundations
of mathematics in Forlì. Here are the revised texts
of my lecture Confessions of an apostate mathematician,
in English
(or pdf format)
and Italian
(or pdf format)
(with many thanks to
Professor Gianfranco Basti for correcting the Italian).
IST
A paper published in 1977: Internal set theory.
Ezekiel's Wheel
This is a poem I wrote many years ago for Nancy Wong Nelson (1930-1988).
ps or html.
Ramified recursion and intuitionism
Presented to the Colloque Trajectorien,
Strasbourg/Obernai, June 12-16, 1995.
It is an
introduction to recent work of Bellantoni, Cook, and Leivant on
ramified recursion with some remarks on a possible logic of the
feasible. This paper
(or pdf format)
is
thinking out loud, not a finished work.
Space-Time-Chance
A non-technical talk on Space-Time-Chance.
Also available in Romanian,
translated by Alexandra Seremina and courtesy of
azoft.
A Polish translation is here,
courtesy of Olga Babenko. A Danish translation is
here, courtesy of Einar Solbakken.
A Czech translation is here,
courtesy of Olga Babenko.
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