As a doctoral student in decision sciences, I wandered into a classroom at MIT where S.E. Luria was teaching an introductory biology class to engineers. I sat in the back and caught the last few minutes of the class.
I will describe Maxwell's demon, the Smoluchowski ratchet and pawl, the Szilard engine that relates information and heat, and some work of Brillouin, Landauer, Bennett and others on these topics.
Active sequential hypothesis testing problem arises in a broad spectrum of applications in cognition, communications, design of experiments, and sensor management.
The notion of visibility graphs can be extended to that of pseudo-visibility graphs, where the edges between vertices do not necessarily remain straight line-segments.
This will be a one hour crash course on some of the basic ideas of classical mechanics: configuration space, Lagrangians, the principle of stationary action, and Noether's theorem.
The determinant and the permanent of a matrix, though deceivingly similar in their definitions, behave very differently with respect to how efficiently one can compute these quantities.
If networks of chemical reactions are the circuits of biology then catalysts are the switches. But which species should be called catalysts? Chemistry textbooks answer this question when there is a single reaction.
Climate skeptics today treat climate science and policies derived therefrom as a global conspiracy with the goal of fleecing the non-conspirators, namely the skeptics. The basic objection to the conspiracy is that it is founded on false science.
