The End of an Era

On July 8 2011, was the last launch of the NASA space shuttle program. The shuttle Atlantis carried four veteran astronauts to the International Space Station: Commander Christopher Ferguson; Pilot Douglas Hurley; Mission Specialist 1 Sandra Magnus; and Mission Specialist 2 Rex Walheim. STS-135 was Atlantis' 33rd final mission. This historic flight was the 135th and final mission of NASA's space shuttle program.

World Wide Web 20th Anniversary.

This is the year of important anniversaries. In March of 1989 famous now Tim Berners-Lee provided to his supervisor at the CERN office in Geneva a proposal for a multimedia distribution of documents simply entitled "Information Management: a proposal". This was the beginning of a new era. A transformation of human information gathering and distribution that has drastically influenced the way we communicate, learn, work and entertain. A copy of the original document can be found at: http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

125th Anniversary of IEEE

A special web page dedicated to the 125th anniversary of IEEE has been set up at http://www.ieee125.org/ .

IEEE history goes back to 1884 when the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) was founded. AIEE merged in 1963 with the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) forming the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Today IEEE has over 365,000 members in 160 countries and produces 30 percent of the world's literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields. It publishes more than 120 peer-reviewed journals, hundreds of conference proceedings, professional standards, and educational materials [1].

[1]. (2009) IEEE Today, http://www.ieee.org/web/aboutus/today/index.html

125th Anniversary of the Engineering Index (Ei)

Ei was founded in 1884 by Dr. John Butler Johnson, a professor of Civil Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1918, it was acquired by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. In 1998, Ei was purchase by Elsevier. Known for several years as COMPENDEX, Ei is one of the most comprehensive databases for engineering information. Today, Compendex has over 11 million records. Source: "Ei History", Engineering Information. http://www.ei.org/evhistory

Is Time Infinite?

Paul J. Steinhardt of Joseph Henry Laboratories, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ and
Neil Turok from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of Cambridge University in England have published a couple of papers that propose a different cosmological model. In their first paper (Sienhardt and Turok, 2002) they said: “the universe undergoes an endless sequence of cosmic epochs that begin with a "bang" and end in a "crunch." Their most recent paper (Sienhardt and Turok, 2006) gave an explanation of the reason the Cosmological constant is so small and positive and is based on their preliminary idea of endless continuous cycles of Big Bangs; under these conditions space and time could continue forever. This theory is not widely accepted yet.

Steinhardt, Paul J.; Turok, Neil (2006).
Why the Cosmological Constant Is Small and Positive. Science Express, published online May 4, 2006. Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1126231.

Steinhardt, Paul J.; Turok, Neil (2002).
A Cyclic Model of the Universe, Science 24 May 2002: Vol. 296. no. 5572, pp. 1436 – 1439. Originally published in Science Express on 25 April 2002.

Quantum Knots

A feature article in the section on Information Technology of Scientific America, April 19, 2006 provides a clear and basic description of how machines using quantum mechanics models can perform at exceedingly high levels not possible with today's ordinary computers. Although, quantum computing it is in its initial developing stage the applications for using such machines are very promising.

Computing with Quantum Knots, by Collins, Graham P., Scientific American, April 2006, Vol. 294, Issue 4.

Other readings on the subject:

Topological Quantum Computation. John Preskill. Lecture notes available at www.theory.caltech.edu/-preskill/ph219/topological.pdf

Mathematics of quantum computation, edited by Goong Chen, Ranee K. Brylinski.
Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2002.

Principles of quantum computation and information, byGiuliano Benenti and Giulio Casati, Giuliano Strini. River Edge, NJ : World Scientific Pub., 2004.




NSF Award for Young Scientists


A professor of applied mathematics at the California Institute of Technology has received the Alan T. Watermann Award. Dr. Emmanuel J. Candes a native of France with a doctoral degree from Stanford University (1988) won this prestigious award granted by the National Science Foundation (USA) for developing new techniques in the study of the representation of wave signals which can have significant applications in areas like aircraft safety, DNA analysis, and medical technology. For more details look at:

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=106889


Information about the Alan T. Waterman Award: http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/awards/waterman/waterman.htm#information




Engineering Deans moving into the Provost’ Office


Prism a magazine of the American Society for Engineering Education in its April 2006 issues reported about how in American Universities engineering deans are increasingly moving into the position of provost. The article “All the right moves” by Alvin P. Sanoff, p 25-29, asserts that the training and experience as engineers are valuable skills for this type of positions. . This article is available full-text thru major library databases.
http://www.prism-magazine.org/

2006 Abel Prize for Mathematics.

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has announced this week the winner of the 2006 Abel Prize: Lennart Carleson of the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. The announcement made by the president of the Norwegian Academy, Ole Didrik Lærum, indicates the selection was made based on Carleston outstanding contributions to the field of harmonic analysis. http://www.abelprisen.no/en/

The Niels Henrik Abel Memorial Fund was established in 2002 to recognize
outstanding scientific work in the field of mathematics. The prize is US$ 920,000.

Carleson’s publications include, the article:
Carleson, Lennart, “On Convergence and Growth of Partial Sums of Fourier Series.”
Acta Mathematica. V. 116, 1966 p.135-157.
And the book: Carleson, Lennart, Selected Problems on Exceptional Sets. Princeton, N.J: Van Nostrand. 1967.