In 1535, when Jacques Cartier landed in Canada for the second time, he sailed up the Saint-Lawrence, and spent the winter at Stadaconé. His ships were frozen in the ice for five months. A strange disease attacked the indigenous population, and then the French sailors. In a two month period, almost all Cartier's men became sick. Facing such a tragic situation, the explorer carried out an examina...

Article history: Received 11 April 2011 Revised 13 September 2011 Accepted 14 September 2011 Available online 28 September 2011 Communicated by Jacques Wolfmann

Jacques Monod, born 100 years ago, was one of the main founders of molecular biology. A quotation of Roger Stanier seems to me of immediate relevance to the topic of this meeting on ‘‘Chance and necessity in evolution,’’ dedicated to the works of Jacques Monod: ‘‘Jacques Monod, one of the great scientists of the twentieth century, will always have an honored place among the leaders of the secon...

The lives of mathematical prodigies who passed away very early after groundbreaking work invoke a fascination for later generations: The early death of Niels Henrik Abel (1802–1829) from ill health after a sled trip to visit his fiancé for Christmas; the obscure circumstances of Evariste Galois’ (1811–1832) duel; the deaths of consumption of Gotthold Eisenstein (1823–1852) (who sometimes lectur...

We give some lectures on the work on formal logic of Jacques Herbrand, and sketch his life and his influence on automated theorem proving. The intended audience ranges from students interested in logic over historians to logicians. Besides the well-known correction of Herbrand’s False Lemma by Gödel and Dreben, we also present the hardly known unpublished correction of Heijenoort and its conseq...

This article proposes an idealized model of direct-inverse systems inspired by canonical morphology, against which attested systems are then evaluated in terms of their deviation from it. A language-independent definition of obviation is provided, and then applied to language families other than Algonquian. Referential hierarchies are shown not to be the only way of accounting for direct-invers...