1990 in science

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The year 1990 in science and technology involved some significant events.

Contents

Astronomy and space exploration

Biology

Computer science

History of science

Mathematics

Paleontology

Physiology and medicine

Psychology

Awards

Births

Deaths

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Israel Gelfand</span> Soviet mathematician (1913–2009)

Israel Moiseevich Gelfand, also written Israïl Moyseyovich Gel'fand, or Izrail M. Gelfand was a prominent Soviet-American mathematician. He made significant contributions to many branches of mathematics, including group theory, representation theory and functional analysis. The recipient of many awards, including the Order of Lenin and the first Wolf Prize, he was a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society and professor at Moscow State University and, after immigrating to the United States shortly before his 76th birthday, at Rutgers University. Gelfand is also a 1994 MacArthur Fellow.

In mathematics, in particular in the theory of modular forms, a Hecke operator, studied by Erich Hecke, is a certain kind of "averaging" operator that plays a significant role in the structure of vector spaces of modular forms and more general automorphic representations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Lawrence</span> British–Israeli mathematician

Ruth Elke Lawrence-Neimark is a British–Israeli mathematician and a professor of mathematics at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a researcher in knot theory and algebraic topology. In the public eye, she is best known for having been a child prodigy in mathematics.

In mathematics, an Euler system is a collection of compatible elements of Galois cohomology groups indexed by fields. They were introduced by Kolyvagin in his work on Heegner points on modular elliptic curves, which was motivated by his earlier paper Kolyvagin (1988) and the work of Thaine (1988). Euler systems are named after Leonhard Euler because the factors relating different elements of an Euler system resemble the Euler factors of an Euler product.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yuri Manin</span> Russian mathematician (1937–2023)

Yuri Ivanovich Manin was a Russian mathematician, known for work in algebraic geometry and diophantine geometry, and many expository works ranging from mathematical logic to theoretical physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roger Shepard</span> American psychologist (1929–2020)

Roger Newland Shepard was an American cognitive scientist and author of the "universal law of generalization" (1987). He was considered a father of research on spatial relations. He studied mental rotation, and was an inventor of non-metric multidimensional scaling, a method for representing certain kinds of statistical data in a graphical form that can be comprehended by humans. The optical illusion called Shepard tables and the auditory illusion called Shepard tones are named for him.

In number theory, Tate's thesis is the 1950 PhD thesis of John Tate completed under the supervision of Emil Artin at Princeton University. In it, Tate used a translation invariant integration on the locally compact group of ideles to lift the zeta function twisted by a Hecke character, i.e. a Hecke L-function, of a number field to a zeta integral and study its properties. Using harmonic analysis, more precisely the Poisson summation formula, he proved the functional equation and meromorphic continuation of the zeta integral and the Hecke L-function. He also located the poles of the twisted zeta function. His work can be viewed as an elegant and powerful reformulation of a work of Erich Hecke on the proof of the functional equation of the Hecke L-function. Erich Hecke used a generalized theta series associated to an algebraic number field and a lattice in its ring of integers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bertram Kostant</span> American Jewish mathematician

Bertram Kostant was an American mathematician who worked in representation theory, differential geometry, and mathematical physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adrian Smith (statistician)</span> British statistician (born 1946)

Sir Adrian Frederick Melhuish Smith, PRS is a British statistician who is chief executive of the Alan Turing Institute and president of the Royal Society.

In the mathematical field of representation theory, a Kazhdan–Lusztig polynomial is a member of a family of integral polynomials introduced by David Kazhdan and George Lusztig. They are indexed by pairs of elements y, w of a Coxeter group W, which can in particular be the Weyl group of a Lie group.

Anthony William Knapp is an American mathematician and professor emeritus at the State University of New York, Stony Brook working in representation theory. For much of his career, Knapp was a professor at Cornell University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fermat's Last Theorem</span> 17th-century conjecture proved by Andrew Wiles in 1994

In number theory, Fermat's Last Theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than 2. The cases n = 1 and n = 2 have been known since antiquity to have infinitely many solutions.

In mathematics, a weakly symmetric space is a notion introduced by the Norwegian mathematician Atle Selberg in the 1950s as a generalisation of symmetric space, due to Élie Cartan. Geometrically the spaces are defined as complete Riemannian manifolds such that any two points can be exchanged by an isometry, the symmetric case being when the isometry is required to have period two. The classification of weakly symmetric spaces relies on that of periodic automorphisms of complex semisimple Lie algebras. They provide examples of Gelfand pairs, although the corresponding theory of spherical functions in harmonic analysis, known for symmetric spaces, has not yet been developed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem</span> 1995 publication in mathematics

Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is a proof by British mathematician Sir Andrew Wiles of a special case of the modularity theorem for elliptic curves. Together with Ribet's theorem, it provides a proof for Fermat's Last Theorem. Both Fermat's Last Theorem and the modularity theorem were believed to be impossible to prove using previous knowledge by almost all living mathematicians at the time.

In mathematics, the Springer resolution is a resolution of the variety of nilpotent elements in a semisimple Lie algebra, or the unipotent elements of a reductive algebraic group, introduced by Tonny Albert Springer in 1969. The fibers of this resolution are called Springer fibers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher Deninger</span> German mathematician (born 1958)

Christopher Deninger is a German mathematician at the University of Münster. Deninger's research focuses on arithmetic geometry, including applications to L-functions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hee Oh</span> South Korean American mathematician

Hee Oh is a Korean American mathematician and the Abraham Robinson Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. She made contributions to dynamical systems, discrete subgroups of Lie groups, and their connections to geometry and number theory.

In mathematics, the Hecke algebra is the algebra generated by Hecke operators, which are named after Erich Hecke.

Mikhail Kapranov, is a Russian mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry, representation theory, mathematical physics, and category theory. He is currently a professor of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo.

References

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  13. Colman, Andrew M. (2009). A Dictionary of Psychology (3 ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN   9780191726828. The illusion was first presented by the US psychologist Roger N(ewland) Shepard (born 1929) in his book Mind Sights: Original Visual Illusions, Ambiguities, and Other Anomalies (1990, p. 48), Shepard commented that 'any knowledge or understanding of the illusion we may gain at the intellectual level remains virtually powerless to diminish the magnitude of the illusion' (p. 128).