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Kiyoshi Itô (90), professor emeritus at kyoto University, has become the first winner of the Gauss Prize. This prize is to honor scientist whose mathematical research has had an impact outside mathematics. Ito’s work, mainly in establishing a well defined calculus (named Ito’s calculus) to treat high irregular noise functions has got widespread application in describing several stochastic processes across fields like economics, biology, chemistry, physics, etc. Ito’s calculus is behind the pricing of options introduced by Black, Scholes and Merton (which got them a Nobel price). ...

We all are aware of recent cases of fraud in science. The case of cloning in South Korea is the most recent one, but not the first or the last to happen. Identifying those cases is hard, since most of the times the verification of the claims is a long time-consuming process. Very recently, Robert L. Park has identified some warning signs about a scientific discoverythat can make us doubt about the scientific soundness of it, since they indicate that a scientific claim lies well outside the bounds of rational scientific discourse:  * The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media * The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work * The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection * Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal * The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries * The discoverer has worked in isolation * The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation Several examples with all or several of these red lights come to my mind. ...

The Edge has a summary-article on a Kevin Kelly’s talk on The Next 100 Years of Science: Long-term Trends in the Scientific Method. Kevin Kelly helped launch Wiredmagazine in 1993 and has published several books and articles in publications such as The Economist, The New York Times, Time, etc. He rises some interesting points about what’s next in science for this century. Specifically: * There will be more change in the next 50 years of science than in the last 400 years. ...

Take a coin and toss it a number \(N\) of times in a time interval of duration \(T\). Suppose that every time you get head you win \(a\) euros and that you lose the same amount of money when you get tail. Then your capital is a random process with ups and dows like this:  This process is a stochastic process usually called “Random Walk” and its properties depend on the parameters $N, a $ and \(T\). ...

Authors: Benny Davidovitch, Esteban Moro, and Howard A. Stone Journal: Physical Review Letters 95, 244505 (2005). LINK Abstract: We study the spreading of viscous drops on a solid substrate, taking into account the effects of thermal fluctuations in the fluid momentum. A nonlinear stochastic lubrication equation is derived and studied using numerical simulations and scaling analysis. We show that asymptotically spreading drops admit self-similar shapes, whose average radii can increase at rates much faster than these predicted by Tanner’s law. ...

When tea is poured in a cup of hot water, we observe a phenomenon called diffusion: in the end particles of tea spread evenly throughout the mass of water and we enjoy our cup of tea. Diffusion occurs as a result of the second law of thermodynamics (increase of entropy) and can be modeled quantitatively using the diffusion equation (or heat equation). This is a funny equation, since it establishes that the velocity of spreading is infinite while the mean root square fluctuations of the position of the particles grows in time as ...