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This blog has been a very long time in the making. Last summer I visited the Niels Bohr Library and Archives of the American Institute of Physics. That visit turned into an interview (Allison Rein interviewed me). Very excited to share this. I hope it will help a few more people find their way to our catalogue as well! aip.org/library/ex-libris-univ #arhives #digipres #historyofscience #physics #nuclearphysics

E0040_011.jpg
AIP · Inside the International Atomic Energy Agency Archives UnitAn Interview with Archivist, Elizabeth Kata

For most of history, the disciplines of science and philosophy are tightly connected, arguably even the same.

Alchemy was considered a science, and indeed people like Newton and Bacon dabbled in it. Facts and theories as we now know them are much different, and bordered on philosophical arguments. Experimentation wasn't a standard procedure, and a community of scientific professionals hardly existed.

#history #histodons #quote #bookstodon #historyOfScience

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I am currently reading Euler's “Introductio in analysin infinitorum” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduc). The Wikipedia article calls it “the first precalculus book” — which is true in a strict sense, since there are no integrals or derivatives in it, but the book contains so much material about infinite series and products that it cannot be called precalculus in the modern sense.
The text looks quite modern (since all later authors followed Euler's style) but a lot of notations that today we take for granted are still missing, especially sum and product sign and even indices. How does he then manage to write about infinite series?
A generic power series takes for Euler the form

𝐴 + 𝐵𝑥 + 𝐶𝑥𝑥 + 𝐷𝑥³ + 𝐸𝑥⁴ &ct.,

and he also speaks of the series of coefficients, 𝐴, 𝐵, 𝐶, 𝐷, 𝐸 &ct., even if he apparently has no concept of a series as a mathematical object in its own right.
For more complex manipulations of series, Euler use the concept of the general term of a series (so that the general term of the geometric series is 𝑥ⁿ), and with this concept one can do almost the same calculations as with a sum operator.
And what is if there is more than one infinite series? A second series is for Euler often

𝑎 + 𝑏𝑥 + 𝑐𝑥𝑥 + 𝑑𝑥³ + 𝑒𝑥⁴ &ct.

and a third and fourth series may have the coefficients 𝑎', 𝑏', 𝑐', 𝑑', 𝑒' &ct. and 𝑎'', 𝑏'', 𝑐'', 𝑑'', 𝑒'' &ct. This way he produces a lot of mathematics.

And in one place (§214), when he has used up all other methods to create new types of coefficients, he even distinguishes between a series with coefficients in italics and one with coefficients in straight letters:

A + B𝑥 + C𝑥𝑥 + D𝑥³ + E𝑥⁴ &ct.,

en.wikipedia.orgIntroductio in analysin infinitorum - Wikipedia

CEA: Une histoire spatiale qui commence en 1959

Pour traquer les poussières radioactives liées aux essais nucléaires, le CEA embarque un compteur Geiger dans un missile. À 100 km d’altitude, surprise : des rayons gamma viennent d’au-dessus. C’est le début de l’astrophysique au CEA.

📷 CEA/D. Baclet/C. Jehanno/J.Labeyrie
cea.fr/Pages/actualites/scienc

#CEA#Saclay#Astrophysics

Last week, our students learned how to conduct a proper evaluation for an NLP experiment. To this end, we introduced a small textcorpus with sentences about Joseph Fourier, who counts as one of the discoverers of the greenhouse effect, responsible for global warming.

github.com/ISE-FIZKarlsruhe/IS

#ise2025 #nlp #lecture #climatechange #globalwarming #historyofscience #climate @fiz_karlsruhe @fizise @tabea @enorouzi @sourisnumerique

Next stop in our NLP timeline is 2013, the introduction of low dimensional dense word vectors - so-called "word embeddings" - based on distributed semantics, as e.g. word2vec by Mikolov et al. from Google, which enabled representation learning on text.

T. Mikolov et al. (2013). Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space.
arxiv.org/abs/1301.3781

#NLP #AI #wordembeddings #word2vec #ise2025 #historyofscience @fiz_karlsruhe @fizise @tabea @sourisnumerique @enorouzi