SEKI Takakazu: A Traditional Japanese Mathematician

A Mathematician Reads

New York University mathematical physicist Alan Sokal published in the postmodern humanities journal Social Text a parody entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” [1]. His point in doing so was to test whether the field of “cultural studies of science” was seriously lacking in “intellectual standards”. His article is nonsense from start to...

The mathematician as a formalist

Commentary on Seki

Dr. Seki’s study presents a relatively unusual pediatric population. Of the 68 patients studied, 18 were nonresponders to prior treatment and 50 were previously untreated. This large sample of untreated patients provides an excellent opportunity for study. Dr. Seki noted that the initiation protocol for zonisamide administration was 2mg/kg per day, given twice daily, morning and evening. Howeve...

Recognizing Seki in Computer Go

Seki is a situation of coexistence in the game of Go, where neither player can profitably capture the opponent’s stones. This paper presents a new method for deciding whether an enclosed area is or can become a seki. The method combines local search with global-level static analysis. Local search is used to identify possible seki, and reasoning on the global level is applied to determine which ...

Jonathan Borwein: Experimental Mathematician

Jonathan M. Borwein unexpectedly died on 2 August 2016, in London, Ontario, Canada, where he had been visiting on leave from home institution, the University of Newcastle, Australia. Since his death, the present author and Nelson H. F. Beebe of the University of Utah have been collecting Borwein’s many published papers, books, reports and talks, as well as a number of articles written by others...