Brian Hayes (born 10 December 1949 [1] ) is an American scientist, columnist and author.
Hayes is a senior writer and regular columnist for the magazine American Scientist , and was editor in chief for the magazine from 1990 to 1992. He has also edited and written columns for Scientific American , as well as writing for Computer Language and The Sciences . [2] He won a National Magazine Award for his essay "Clock of Ages" in 2000. [3]
Hayes is the author of three books:
Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions. It has applications in many fields of social science, and is used extensively in economics, logic, systems science and computer science. Initially, game theory addressed two-person zero-sum games, in which a participant's gains or losses are exactly balanced by the losses and gains of the other participant. In the 1950s, it was extended to the study of non zero-sum games, and was eventually applied to a wide range of behavioral relations. It is now an umbrella term for the science of rational decision making in humans, animals, and computers.
John Horton Conway was an English mathematician. He was active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He also made contributions to many branches of recreational mathematics, most notably the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life.
Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer with interests also encompassing magic, scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literature – especially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton. He was a leading authority on Lewis Carroll; The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll's two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold over a million copies. He had a lifelong interest in magic and illusion and in 1999, MAGIC magazine named him as one of the "100 Most Influential Magicians of the Twentieth Century". He was considered the doyen of American puzzlers. He was a prolific and versatile author, publishing more than 100 books.
Sir Roger Penrose is a British mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford, an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and University College London.
Recreational mathematics is mathematics carried out for recreation (entertainment) rather than as a strictly research- and application-based professional activity or as a part of a student's formal education. Although it is not necessarily limited to being an endeavor for amateurs, many topics in this field require no knowledge of advanced mathematics. Recreational mathematics involves mathematical puzzles and games, often appealing to children and untrained adults and inspiring their further study of the subject.
Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the world. Modern science is typically divided into two or three major branches: the natural sciences, which study the physical world; and the behavioural sciences, which study individuals and societies. The formal sciences, which study formal systems governed by axioms and rules, are sometimes described as being sciences as well; however, they are often regarded as a separate field because they rely on deductive reasoning instead of the scientific method or empirical evidence as their main methodology. Applied sciences are disciplines that use scientific knowledge for practical purposes, such as engineering and medicine.
Steven J. Brams is an American game theorist and political scientist at the New York University Department of Politics. Brams is best known for using the techniques of game theory, public choice theory, and social choice theory to analyze voting systems and fair division. He is one of the independent discoverers of approval voting, as well as extensions of approval voting to multiple-winner elections to give proportional representation of different interests.
Ian Nicholas Stewart is a British mathematician and a popular-science and science-fiction writer. He is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick, England.
Brian Randolph Greene is an American physicist known for his research on string theory. He is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University and the chairman of the World Science Festival, which he co-founded in 2008. Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi–Yau manifolds. He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point.
Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp was a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Berlekamp was widely known for his work in computer science, coding theory and combinatorial game theory.
Solomon Wolf Golomb was an American mathematician, engineer, and professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, best known for his works on mathematical games. Most notably, he invented Cheskers in 1948. He also fully described polyominoes in 1953. He specialized in problems of combinatorial analysis, number theory, coding theory, and communications. Pentomino boardgames, based on his work, would go on to inspire Tetris.
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is a professional society dedicated to applied mathematics, computational science, and data science through research, publications, and community. SIAM is the world's largest scientific society devoted to applied mathematics, and roughly two-thirds of its membership resides within the United States. Founded in 1951, the organization began holding annual national meetings in 1954, and now hosts conferences, publishes books and scholarly journals, and engages in advocacy in issues of interest to its membership. Members include engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, both those employed in academia and those working in industry. The society supports educational institutions promoting applied mathematics.
Steven Henry Strogatz is an American mathematician and author, and the Susan and Barton Winokur Distinguished Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Mathematics at Cornell University. He is known for his work on nonlinear systems, including contributions to the study of synchronization in dynamical systems, and for his research in a variety of areas of applied mathematics, including mathematical biology and complex network theory.
Steven C. Hayes is an American clinical psychologist and Nevada Foundation Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno Department of Psychology, where he is a faculty member in their Ph.D. program in behavior analysis. He is known for developing relational frame theory, an account of human higher cognition. He is the co-developer of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), a popular evidence-based form of psychotherapy that uses mindfulness, acceptance, and values-based methods, and is the co-developer of process-based therapy (PBT), a new approach to evidence-based therapies more generally. He also coined the term clinical behavior analysis.
Samuel Karlin was an American mathematician at Stanford University in the late 20th century.
Dennis Elliot Shasha is an American professor of computer science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, a division of New York University. He is also an associate director of NYU WIRELESS. His current areas of research include work done with biologists on pattern discovery for microarrays, combinatorial design, network inference, and protein docking; work done with physicists, musicians, and professionals in finance on algorithms for time series; and work on database applications in untrusted environments. Other areas of interest include database tuning as well as tree and graph matching.
Louis Achille Brocot was a French clockmaker and amateur mathematician.
In a publishing career spanning 80 years (1930–2010), popular mathematics and science writer Martin Gardner (1914–2010) authored or edited over 100 books and countless articles, columns and reviews.
David Wolfe is a mathematician and amateur Go player.
Judith Ronnie Goodstein is an American historian of science, historian of mathematics, archivist, and book author. She worked for many years at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where she is University Archivist Emeritus.