The Galton board is a well known device for showing how repeated Bernoulli trials on a triangular lattice produce an approximately normal distribution. Marking the 150th anniversary of Galton's 1875 construction, this paper revisits the original apparatus and extends it to a cylindrical setting in which the peg lattice is wrapped around a cylinder. This creates angular periodicity and leads to height dependent behaviour that does not arise in the classical planar design. The cylindrical form links Galton's demonstration of variation and the emergence of the normal distribution with modern ideas in circular statistics, giving a physical realisation of binomial random walks on a circular linear product space. We distinguish cases where the wrapped lattice covers only an arc from those that span the full circumference, and show how these geometries lead to wrapped binomial and wrapped normal behaviour. We describe the construction of our physical model, discuss practical issues for replication, and analyse its statistical and pedagogical properties as a modern reinterpretation of Galton's work.
September 7, 2025 marked the 80th anniversary of the birth of Oleg Marichev. Marichev is known mathematician which has developed many of Mathematica's algorithms for the calculation of definite and indefinite integrals and hypergeometric functions including Meijer G-function.
2025 marks the 300th birthday of Father Eliseo della Concezione, professor of Experimental Physics at the Royal Academy of Studies of Palermo. To celebrate this anniversary, the Physics and Chemistry Library of the University Library System and the Department of Physics and Chemistry - Emilio Segre' have organized several cultural activities. In the article, after a brief biographical description of Father Eliseo della Concezione, we will present the activities carried out and discuss the historical and educational aspects of Father Eliseo's work carried out during his stay at the Royal Academy of Palermo at the end of 18th century.
Starting in 2003 when the first MWE workshop was held with ACL in Sapporo, Japan, this year, the joint workshop of MWE-UD co-located with the LREC-COLING 2024 conference marked the 20th anniversary of MWE workshop events over the past nearly two decades. Standing at this milestone, we look back to this workshop series and summarise the research topics and methodologies researchers have carried out over the years. We also discuss the current challenges that we are facing and the broader impacts/synergies of MWE research within the CL and NLP fields. Finally, we give future research perspectives. We hope this position paper can help researchers, students, and industrial practitioners interested in MWE get a brief but easy understanding of its history, current, and possible future.
The brief history for the prediction of the nuclear chirality is provided. The theoretical and experimental investigations of the nuclear chirality are reviewed, including the verification of chiral doublet bands, the chiral conundrum and its resolution, and the prediction and observation of the multiple chiral doublets (M$χ$D). Some recent theoretical progresses are highlighted, including the chiral collective Hamiltonian, the A-plot and the K-plot, the nuclear chirality-parity (ChP) violation, the chiral rotation induced by the pairing correlations, as well as the chiral dynamics. The possibly emerging area, challenges that lie ahead, and opportunities for progress in the context of the nuclear chirality are discussed.
Upon its release in late 2022, ChatGPT has brought a seismic shift in the entire landscape of AI, both in research and commerce. Through instruction-tuning a large language model (LLM) with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback, it showed that a model could answer human questions and follow instructions on a broad panel of tasks. Following this success, interests in LLMs have intensified, with new LLMs flourishing at frequent interval across academia and industry, including many start-ups focused on LLMs. While closed-source LLMs (e.g., OpenAI's GPT, Anthropic's Claude) generally outperform their open-source counterparts, the progress on the latter has been rapid with claims of achieving parity or even better on certain tasks. This has crucial implications not only on research but also on business. In this work, on the first anniversary of ChatGPT, we provide an exhaustive overview of this success, surveying all tasks where an open-source LLM has claimed to be on par or better than ChatGPT.
The paper is dedicated to the anniversary of the discovery of Alfvén waves. The concept of Alfvén waves has played an outstanding role in the formation and development of cosmical electrodynamics. A distinctive feature of Alfvén waves is that at each point in space the group velocity vector and the external magnetic field vector are collinear to each other. As a result, Alfvén waves can carry momentum, energy, and information over long distances. We briefly describe two Alfvén resonators, one of which is formed in the ionosphere, and the second presumably exists in the Earth's radiation belt. The existence of an ionospheric resonator is justified theoretically and confirmed by numerous observations. The second resonator is located between reflection points located high above the Earth symmetrically with respect to the plane of the geomagnetic equator. Keywords: Alfvén velocity, dispersion law, group velocity, geometric optics, heavy ions.
In 2021, the Coordinated Science Laboratory CSL, an Interdisciplinary Research Unit at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, hosted the Future of Computing Symposium to celebrate its 70th anniversary. CSL's research covers the full computing stack, computing's impact on society and the resulting need for social responsibility. In this white paper, we summarize the major technological points, insights, and directions that speakers brought forward during the Future of Computing Symposium. Participants discussed topics related to new computing paradigms, technologies, algorithms, behaviors, and research challenges to be expected in the future. The symposium focused on new computing paradigms that are going beyond traditional computing and the research needed to support their realization. These needs included stressing security and privacy, the end to end human cyber physical systems and with them the analysis of the end to end artificial intelligence needs. Furthermore, advances that enable immersive environments for users, the boundaries between humans and machines will blur and become seamless. Particular integration challenges were made clear in the final discussion on the i
We have recently passed the 75th anniversary of one of the most important results in solar and space physics: Hannes Alfvén's discovery of Alfvén waves and the Alfvén speed. To celebrate the anniversary, this article recounts some major episodes in the history of MHD waves. Following an initially cool reception, Alfvén's ideas were propelled into the spotlight by Fermi's work on cosmic rays, the new mystery of coronal heating and, as scientific perception of interplanetary space shifted dramatically and the space race started, detection of Alfvén waves in the solar wind. From then on, interest in MHD waves boomed, laying the foundations for modern remote observations of MHD waves in the Sun, coronal seismology and some of today's leading theories of coronal heating and solar wind acceleration. In 1970, Alfvén received the Nobel Prize for his work in MHD, including these discoveries. The article concludes with some reflection about what the history implies about the way we do science, especially the advantages and pitfalls of idealised mathematical models.
The year of 2005 marks the 75th anniversary since Trumpler (1930) provided the first definitive proof of interstellar grains by demonstrating the existence of general absorption and reddening of starlight in the galactic plane. This article reviews our progressive understanding of the nature of interstellar dust.
On the 500th anniversary of Albrecht Dürer's copperplate engraving Melencolia I, we invite readers to join in a time-honored "party game" that has attracted art historians and scientists for many years: guessing the nature and meaning of the composition's enigmatic stone polyhedron. Our main purpose is to demonstrate the usefulness of the cross ratio in the analysis of works in perspective. We show how the cross ratio works as a projectively invariant "shape parameter" of the polyhedron, and how it can be used in analyzing various theories of this figure.
The Unruh effect is essential to keep the consistency of quantum field theory in inertial and uniformly accelerated frames. Thus, the Unruh effect must be considered as well tested as quantum field theory itself. In spite of it, it would be nice to realize an experiment whose output could be directly interpreted in terms of the Unruh effect. This is not easy because the linear acceleration needed to reach a temperature 1 K is of order $10^{20} {\rm m/s}^2$. We discuss here a conceptually simple experiment reachable under present technology which may accomplish this goal. The inspiration for this proposal can be traced back to Atsushi Higuchi's Ph.D. thesis, which makes it particularly suitable to pay tribute to him on occasion of his $60^{\rm th}$ anniversary.
The year 2024 marks two anniversaries: The 70th anniversary of CERN and the 50th anniversary of the $J/Ψ$ discovery. At this occasion I have been asked to give review talks on the significance of these anniversaries. This article is an expanded version of these talks.
This collection presents a selected set of unsolved problems in semigroup theory, a fundamental branch of modern algebra. The publication is dedicated to the 110th anniversary of the birth of E. S. Lyapin, one of the founders of the field and the author of the world's first monograph on semigroups. The collection covers several major directions of contemporary research: potential properties and embeddability of semigroups; structural problems and finiteness conditions in varieties; endomorphisms; solvable and unsolvable classes of finite semigroups and groups; power semigroups; inclusive varieties; and the theory of partial groupoids. It serves both as a tribute to Lyapin's memory and as a roadmap for current and future research in algebraic systems.
This article is dedicated to the 60-th anniversary of the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics and presents a review of normal and superconducting properties of toroidal, altermagnetic, and noncentrosymmetric metals. Metals with toroidal order are compounds not possessing symmetry in respect of space and time inversion but are symmetric in respect of the product of these operations. An electric current propagating through samples of such a material causes its magnetisation. Superconducting states in toroidal metals are a mixture of singlet and triplet states. Superconductivity is gapless even in ideal crystals without impurities. Altermagnets are antiferromagnetic metals that have a specific spin splitting of electron bands determined by time inversion in combinations with rotations and reflections of a crystal lattice. Similar splitting takes place in metals whose symmetry does not have a spatial inversion operation. Both of these types of materials have an anomalous Hall effect. A current propagating through a noncentrosymmetric metal causes magnetization, but this is not the case in altermagnets. On the other hand, in altermagnets, there is a specific piezomagnetic Hall effe
This short report is dedicated to the 40th anniversary of International Journal of Modern Physics A (IJMPA) and Modern Physics Letters A (MPLA). While the report is based on a series of papers[1-8], its content reflects my personal viewpoints. Therefore I am solely responsible for all the statements in the report. In this report we discuss conservation of energies in a curved spacetime including general relativity. We argue that the matter energy is not necessarily conserved in a curved space time due to a lack of time translational invariance, and adding energy of gravitational fields to recover the conservation law of energies fails due to Noether's 2nd theorem. We show that there exists conserved quantities associated with the matter energy momentum tensor other than the energy in a curved spacetime, and discuss consequences of the existence of such conserved charges.
In 1950, Chien-Shiung Wu and her student published a coincidence experiment on entangled photon pairs that were created in electron-positron annihilation. This experiment precisely verified the prediction of quantum electrodynamics. Additionally, it was also the first instance of a precisely controlled quantum entangled state of spatially separated particles, although Wu did not know about this at the time. In 1956, Wu initiated and led the so-called Wu experiment, which discovered parity nonconservation, becoming one of the greatest experiments of the 20th century. As Chen Ning Yang said, Wu's experiments were well known for their precision and accuracy. Experimental precision and accuracy manifested Wu's scientific spirit, which we investigate here in some detail. This paper is the translated transcript of the speech the author made at the International Symposium Commemorating the 110th Anniversary of the Birth of Chien-Shiung Wu, on May 31, 2022. The above abstract is the translation of the original abstract of the speech.
Background: This invited paper is the result of an invitation to write a retrospective article on a "TSE most influential paper" as part of the journal's 50th anniversary. Objective: To reflect on the progress of software engineering prediction research using the lens of a selected, highly cited research paper and 28 years of hindsight. Methods: The paper examines (i) what was achieved, (ii) what has endured and (iii) what could have been done differently with the benefit of retrospection. Conclusions: While many specifics of software project effort prediction have evolved, key methodological issues remain relevant. The original study emphasised empirical validation with benchmarks, out-of-sample testing and data/tool sharing. Four areas for improvement are identified: (i) stronger commitment to Open Science principles, (ii) focus on effect sizes and confidence intervals, (iii) reporting variability alongside typical results and (iv) more rigorous examination of threats to validity.
The year 2023 marks three anniversaries: the 150th anniversary of the French Physical Society, the 100th anniversary since the publication of Louis de Broglie's articles (the first fundamental articles of Quantum Mechanics) and the 50th anniversary of the Standard Model, the theory which describes in a unified framework the strong, the electromagnetic and the weak interactions among elementary particles. This note is an attempt to present the situation of theoretical physics in France during these years and highlight the french contributions in this world effort. We shall see that, although these contributions have been important, french theorists rarely played the leading roles. At the end I will try to draw some conclusions from these findings.
We consider a certain class of exactly solvable models, describing spectral properties an electron moving in random in time external field with different statistical characteristics. This electron can be band - like or belong to a quantum well. The known dynamical Keldysh model is generalized for the case of fields with finite correlation time of fluctuations and for finite transfer frequencies of these fluctuations. In all cases we are able to perform the complete summation of all Feynman diagrams of corresponding perturbation series for the Green's function. This can be done either by the reduction of this series to some continuous fraction or by the use of the generalized Ward identity from which we can derive recurrence relations for the Green's function. In the case of a random field with finite transferred frequency there appear the interesting effects of modulation of spectral density and density of states. Dedicated to 130-th anniversary of Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitza.