Colloquium

Abstract: Whether enjoying the lucid prose of a favorite author or slogging through some other writer's cumbersome, heavy-set prattle (full of parentheses, em-dashes, compound adjectives, and Oxford commas), readers will notice stylistic signatures not only in word choice and grammar, but also in punctuation itself. Indeed, visual sequences of punctuation from different authors produce marvelously […]

Abstract:  Growing up, I always loved learning about world-changing scientific breakthroughs that were discovered by accident.  Penicillin, artificial sweeteners, X-rays, and synthetic dyes are just a few of the discoveries that were stumbled upon by scientists who had other goals in mind.  More recently, I have come to wonder why anecdotes about accidental discoveries in […]

A lot of the mathematics done at NIST supports the research on and measurement of advanced materials and technology. In this rather applied context. surprising mathematics makes an appearance. We present a few examples.

Abstract: As intelligent agents assume larger role in our daily lives, reasoning by humans about liability of such agents as well as reasoning by the intelligent agents themselves about liability becomes more important.  The existing laws, written with humans in mind, will eventually need to be re-interpreted in terms of their applicability in a hybrid […]

Abstract: We overview some basic and striking facts concerning the theory of hypercyclic operators (considered to be born in 1982): 1. Hypercyclicity is a purely infinite-dimensional phenomenon: no finite dimensional space supports any hypercyclic operator; 2. It is not easy at all to determine whether a linear operator is hypercyclic. However, the set of hypercyclic […]