Jens Erik Fenstad - Böcker

These volumes contain a collection of essays by many of the closest co-workers of Raphael Høegh-Krohn, 1938-88, one of the outstanding mathematical physicists of our age. The contributions vary in style, purpose, and content - some are surveys where leading experts sum up and clarify a subject area, others are new and adventurous expeditions into unknown territory. The topics cover most aspects of modern mathematical physics with special emphasis on methods from operator theory and stochastic analysis. Many of the papers are based on talks given at a symposium in honor of Høegh-Krohn at the University of Oslo: however the final volumes are far more than proceedings and great care has been taken to attract contributions from the leading researchers.

These volumes contain a collection of essays by many of the closest co-workers of Raphael Høegh-Krohn, 1938-88, one of the outstanding mathematical physicists of our age. The contributions vary in style, purpose and content - some are surveys where leading experts sum up and clarify a subject area, others are new and adventurous expeditions into unknown territory. The topics cover most aspects of modern mathematical physics with special emphasis on methods from operator theory and stochastic analysis. Many of the papers are based on talks given at a symposium in honour of Høegh-Krohn at the University of Oslo; however the final volumes are far more than proceedings and great care has been taken to attract contributions from the leading researchers.

This book explains exactly what human knowledge is. The key concepts in this book are structures and algorithms, i.e., what the readers “see” and how they make use of what they see. Thus in comparison with some other books on the philosophy (or methodology) of science, which employ a syntactic approach, the author’s approach is model theoretic or structural. Properly understood, it extends the current art and science of mathematical modeling to all fields of knowledge. The link between structure and algorithms is mathematics. But viewing “mathematics” as such a link is not exactly what readers most likely learned in school; thus, the task of this book is to explain what “mathematics” should actually mean.Chapter 1, an introductory essay, presents a general analysis of structures, algorithms and how they are to be linked. Several examples from the natural and social sciences, and from the history of knowledge, are provided in Chapters 2–6. In turn, Chapters7 and 8 extend the analysis to include language and the mind. Structures are what the readers see. And, as abstract cultural objects, they can almost always be seen in many different ways. But certain structures, such as natural numbers and the basic theory of grammar, seem to have an absolute character. Any theory of knowledge grounded in human culture must explain how this is possible. The author’s analysis of this cultural invariance, combining insights from evolutionary theory and neuroscience, is presented in the book’s closing chapter.The book will be of interest to researchers, students and those outside academia who seek a deeper understanding of knowledge in our present-day society.