Rational agents are important objects of study in several research communities, including economics, philosophy, cognitive science, and most recently computer science and artificial intelligence. Crudely, a rational agent is an entity that is capable of acting on its environment, and which chooses to act in such a way as to further its own best interests. There has recently been much interest i...

Rational choice theory is pragmatically used by mainstream economics to explain and defend the existence and behavior of prevailing social and economic institutions as being optimal. Every deviation in actual individual and institutional behavior from the optimum is attributed to imperfections in the agents’ ability to pursue the optimal actions rather than the implausibility of the underlying ...

The string theory is a fast moving subject, both physics wise and in the respect of mathematics. In order to keep up with the discipline it is important to move with new ideas which are being stressed. Here I wish to give extracts from new papers of ideas which I have recently found interesting. There are six papers which are involved: I ."Strings formulated directly in 4 dimensions " A. N...

For every finitary endofunctor H of Set a rational algebraic theory (or a rational finitary monad) R is defined by means of solving all finitary flat systems of recursive equations over H. This generalizes the result of Elgot and his coauthors, describing a free iterative theory of a polynomial endofunctor H as the theory R of all rational infinite trees. We present a coalgebraic proof that R i...

Rational choice theories assert that human beings behave rationally, either in the narrow sense of rational self-interest, or in the broader sense that decisions are rationally based on preferences. These empirical theories make no direct ethical claims, but they may have relevance to ethics. Social contract theorists have maintained, for example, that rational individuals can assent to a socia...

A framework for studying knot and link invariants from any rational conformal field theory is developed. In particular, minimal models, superconformal models and WN models are studied. The invariants are related to the invariants obtained from the Wess-Zumino models associated with the coset representations of these models. Possible Chern-Simons representation of these models is also indicated....

We develop further the theory of Rational Conformal Field Theories (RCFTs) on a cylinder with specified boundary conditions emphasizing the role of a triplet of algebras: the Verlinde, graph fusion and Pasquier algebras. We show that solving Cardy’s equation, expressing consistency of a RCFT on a cylinder, is equivalent to finding integer valued matrix representations of the Verlinde algebra. T...

The paradox between an individual’s decisions to head to the polls and the absence of strictly rational arguments for this action has intrigued – and troubled – many scholars.The present article surveys various theoretical contributions to resolve this paradox of (not) voting. We assess these approaches based on their ability to explain a number of ‘stylised facts’ with respect to voter turnout...

We study the geometric interpretation of two dimensional rational conformal field theories, corresponding to sigma models on Calabi-Yau manifolds. We perform a detailed study of RCFT’s corresponding to T 2 target and identify the Cardy branes with geometric branes. The T ’s leading to RCFT’s admit “complex multiplication” which characterizes Cardy branes as specific D0-branes. We propose a cond...