Fermat's Library

Previously Featured Papers

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Physics

Mathematics

Where are they? Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing

Nick Bolstrom - 15 comments

The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers

Daniel F. Chambliss - 19 comments

Technological Requirements for Terraforming Mars

Robert Zubrin and Christopher McKay - 10 comments

Does Being Bored Make Us More Creative?

Sandi Mann & Rebekah Cadman - 11 comments

A Mathematician’s Lament

Paul Lockhart - 15 comments

Russian blues reveal effects of language on color descrimination

Winawer et al. - 6 comments

Physics as a Way of Thinking

Alpheus W. Smith - 17 comments

Pick the Largest Number

Thomas Cover - 3 comments

Why some things are darker when wet

John Lekner and Michael C. Dorf - 9 comments

Douglas Carl Engelbart: Developing the Underlying Concepts for Contemporary Computing

Susan B. Barnes - 20 comments

Recounting the rationals

Neil Calkin and Herbert S. Wilf - 13 comments

Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?

Edward N. Lorenz - 7 comments

Birds and Frogs

Freeman Dyson - 17 comments

Satellite Communication - An overview of the problems and programs

Wilbur Pritchard - 12 comments

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

John P. A. Ioannidis - 13 comments

The Beginning of the Monte Carlo Method

N. Metropolis - 9 comments

A measurement of excess antenna temperature at 4080 mc/s

Penzias and Wilson - 7 comments

Reading Chess

Henry Baird and Ken Thompson - 9 comments

How Many Objects Can Be Juggled

Jack Kalvan - 6 comments

How to Subvert Democracy: Montesinos in Peru

John McMillan and Pablo Zoido - 9 comments

Life's Irreducible Structure

Michael Polanyi - 12 comments

Von Neumann's First Computer Program

Donald Knuth - 7 comments

Mental Accounting and Consumer Choice

Richard H. Thaler - 7 comments

Can lifestyle changes reverse coronary heart disease?

Ornish et al - 9 comments

Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman - 9 comments

Quantum physics dropwise

Tomas Bohr - 10 comments

A Set of Eight Numbers

Arthur Porges - 9 comments

Voyager Mission Telecommunication Firsts

Posner et al - 12 comments

Why is π² so close to 10?

Noam D. Elkies - 5 comments

3D structures of individual mammalian genomes studied by single-cell Hi-C

Stevens et al. - 8 comments

The Split Brain in Man

Michael S. Gazzaniga - 11 comments

Drawing an elephant with four complex parameters

J. Mayer, K. Khairy, J. Howard - 8 comments

The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature

P. A. M. Dirac - 13 comments

Accurate SHAPE-directed RNA secondary structure modeling, including pseudoknots

Hajdin et al. - 8 comments

Sleep and Mortality: A Population-Based 22-Year Follow-Up Study

Hublin et al - 10 comments

Shelling Out: The Origins of Money

Nick Szabo - 22 comments

Personalized Nutrition by Prediction of Glycemic Responses

David Zeevi, Tal Korem, Niv Zmora, et al. - 8 comments

Fermat’s method of "descente infinie"

Stan Dolan - 8 comments

A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence

John McCarthy, Marvin L. Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude E. Shannon - 9 comments

Simpson's Paradox and the Hot Hand in Basketball

Robert L. Wardrop - 10 comments

Shut Up and Calculate

Max Tegmark - 14 comments

Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation

Freeman Dyson - 10 comments

Self-Control Relies on Glucose as a Limited Energy Source: Willpower Is More Than a Metaphor

Gailliot et al - 8 comments

Human and nonhuman primate meninges harbor lymphatic vessels that can be visualized noninvasively by MRI

Martina Absinta et al. - 6 comments

The Reservisor Automated Airline Reservation System: Combining Communications and Computing

Jon Eklund - 10 comments

The Standard Double Soap Bubble in ℝ² uniquely minimizes perimeter

Joel Foisy et al - 7 comments

More is Different

P. W. Anderson - 9 comments

Modeling: optimal marathon performance on the basis of physiological factors

Michael J. Joyner - 10 comments

Social Facilitation

Robert B. Zajonc - 5 comments

Cognitive and attentional mechanisms in delay of gratification

Mischel, Walter, Ebbe B. Ebbesen, and Antonette Raskoff Zeiss. - 10 comments

The Emperor's Old Clothes

Tony Hoare - 26 comments

The Uncertainty of Science

Richard P. Feynman - 20 comments

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment

Charles T. Munger - 34 comments

Where is everybody? An account of Fermi's question

Eric M. Jones - 10 comments

Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren

John Maynard Keynes - 12 comments

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge

Abraham Flexner - 14 comments

Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform

Vitalik Buterin - 18 comments

Proof Without Words: Pythagorean Runs

Michael Boardman - 6 comments

Eliminating the Penny from the U.S. coinage system: An economic analysis

Raymond E. Lombra - 8 comments

On Being Smart

Nabil H. Mustafa - 12 comments

Electronic Lottery Tickets as Micropayments

Ronald L Rivest - 7 comments

On the series of prime reciprocals

James A. Clarkson - 4 comments

Assessing “Dangerous Climate Change”: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature

James Hansen et al. - 19 comments

The Neutron Enigma

G. L. Greene and P. Geltenbort - 11 comments

Programming Considered as a Human Activity

Edsger W. Dijkstra - 13 comments

Man-computer symbiosis

J. C. R. Licklider - 7 comments

A proof that Euler missed: Evaluating ζ(2) the Easy Way.

Tom Apostol - 7 comments

Pythagorean Theorem proof in Zhoubi Suanjing

Zhao Shuang - 4 comments

DeepStack: Expert-Level Artificial Intelligence in Heads-Up No-Limit Poker

Moravcik et al - 10 comments

Immigration Act of 1924

United States Government - 8 comments

Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory

A. M. Turing - 11 comments

When CSI Meets Public WiFi: Inferring Your Mobile Phone Password via WiFi Signals

Mengyuan Li et al - 10 comments

Why We Need Friendly AI

L. Muehlhauser & N. Bostrom - 11 comments

Prospect Theory

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky - 9 comments

Optimum rehearsal patterns and name learning

T. K. Landauer, R. A. Bjork - 11 comments

A note on Euclid’s Theorem concerning the infinitude of the primes

Filip Saidak - 4 comments

Some Funny Things Happened on the Way to the Moon

Richard H. Battin - 12 comments

About the irrationality of e=2.718...

J. Liouville - 5 comments

The Proposal of the Neutrino

Wolfgang Pauli - 4 comments

Development and Application of NASA's First Standard Spacecraft Computer

Charles E. Trevathan et al - 14 comments

Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care

Kenneth Arrow - 11 comments

What is Life?

Erwin Schrodinger - 7 comments

Elementary proof that e is irational

L.L. Penesi - 3 comments

The Scattering of Cosmic Rays by the Stars of a Galaxy

Richard P. Feynman and Manuel S. Vallarta - 4 comments

The Theory of Interstellar Trade

Paul Krugman - 14 comments

A One-Line Proof of the Infinitude of Primes

Sam Northshield - 4 comments

Patterns of genic intolerance of rare copy number variation in 59,898 human exomes

Douglas M Ruderfer et al - 10 comments

1. Using neural nets to recognize handwritten digits

Michael Nielsen - 57 comments

Possible Existence of a Neutron

J. Chadwick - 6 comments

Examining How the Great Firewall Discovers Hidden Circumvention Servers

Ensafi et al - 8 comments

My observations during the explosion at Trinity

Enrico Fermi - 8 comments

Why the Internet only just works

M Handley - 14 comments

Gabriel's Horn (Thought Experiments Mathematics)

Fredrick Kennard - 7 comments

Proof Without Words: Cubes and Squares

J. Barry Love - 2 comments

A Sample of Brilliance

Jon Bentley - 7 comments

Isaac Newton as a Probabilist

Stephen M. Stigler - 14 comments

How to Expose an Eavesdropper

Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir - 8 comments

The Brachistochrone Curve: The Problem of Quickest Descent

Yutaka Nishiyama - 16 comments

A Note on the Confinement Problem

Butler W. Lampson - 7 comments

A theorem about primes proved on a chessboard

Loren C. Larson - 13 comments

One-sentence proof of Fermat's theorem on sums of two squares

D. Zagier - 10 comments

An elementary proof of Wallis’ product formula for pi

Johan Wastlünd - 9 comments

How to Share a Secret

Adi Shamir - 6 comments

Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?

Nick Bostrom - 27 comments

The Parallel Climbers Puzzle

Alan Tucker - 5 comments

Folding Paper in Half

Gaurish Korpal - 9 comments

The Historical Development of Computer Chess and its Impact on Artificial Intelligence

David Heath, Derek Allum - 13 comments

An elementary treatment of the Feynman sprinkler

Alejandro Jenkins - 8 comments

A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae

Edwin Hubble - 13 comments

A really trivial proof of the Lucas-Lehmer test

J. W. Bruce - 17 comments

How to explain zero-knowledge protocols to your children

Jean-Jacques Quisquater, Louis Guillou , Marie Annick, Tom Berson - 5 comments

Many lives in many worlds

Max Tegmark - 16 comments

Decreasing-Rate Pruning Optimizes the Construction of Efficient and Robust Distributed Networks

Saket Navlakha, Alison L. Barth and Ziv Bar-Joseph - 24 comments

A pendulum theorem

D. J. Acheson - 8 comments

New proof of a minimum property of the regular n-gon

L.F Toth - 9 comments

Cassini, Rømer and the velocity of light

Bobis L. & Lequeux J. - 14 comments

Water extraction on Mars for an expanding human colony

Ralphs M., Franz B., Baker T., Howe S. - 14 comments

Agrarian Justice

Thomas Paine - 15 comments

The transcendence of π

Ivan Niven - 25 comments

Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger

B. P. Abbott et al. - 21 comments

Feynman's proof of the Maxwell equations

Freeman Dyson - 12 comments

TOR: The second generation onion router

Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, Paul Syverson - 15 comments

Irrationality of √2, a geometric proof

Tom Apostol - 4 comments

A new proof of Euclid's Theorem

Filip Saidak - 16 comments

End to the Cosmic-Ray Spectrum?

Kenneth Greisen - 8 comments

Fermat's Last Theorem in Combinatorial Form

W. V. Quine - 3 comments

Irrationality of √m

Harley Flanders - 6 comments

Reflections on Trusting Trust

Ken Thompson - 12 comments

Shortest paper ever published in a serious Math Journal

John Conway and Alexander Soifer - 7 comments

Teleporting an Unknown Quantum State via Dual Classical and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Channels

Charles H. Bennett et al. - 11 comments

On a generalization of the definite integral

H. Lebesgue - 5 comments

Studies on the Chemical Nature of the Substance Inducing Transformation of Pneumococcal Types

Oswald T. et al - 15 comments

On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox

J. S. Bell - 17 comments

Counterexample to Euler's Conjecture on sums of like powers

L. J. Lander and T. R. Parkin - 3 comments

A combinatorial proof of Fermat's "Little" Theorem

S.W.Golomb - 9 comments

Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine

John McCarthy - 28 comments

Evidence for Oscillation of Atmospheric Neutrinos

Super-Kamiokande Collaboration - 14 comments

A Geometric Proof that e is Irrational

Jonathan Sondow - 7 comments

Feynman's derivation of the Schrodinger equation

David Derbes - 14 comments

Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money

John Nash - 63 comments

The Positive Electron

Carl D. Anderson - 13 comments

Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids

J. D. Watson, F. H. Crick - 8 comments

A simple proof that π is irrational

Ivan Niven (1946) - 10 comments

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Satoshi Nakamoto - 48 comments

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Fermat’s Library is a platform for illuminating academic papers. Every week we send you a new paper annotated by the community in the fields of Mathematics, Physics, Economics, Computer Science and Biology.

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