Reminiscences on science at I.H.E.S. A problem on homoclinic theory and a brief review

On the occasion of the 40-th anniversary of IHES I present a few scientific reminiscences: most of my scientific life has been marked by my visits and I run through them concluding with the analysis of a problem that originated during my last visit. The problem is to develop a convergent perturbative algorithm for the construction of the ``Eliasson's potential'' for the stable and unstable manifolds of an invariant torus: and to study its properties. A brief review follows.Comment: 70 Kb; 15 pages, plain TeX, 3 figure

Iron Rings, Doctor Honoris Causa Raoul Bott, Carl Herz, and a Hidden Hand

The degree of Doctor of Sciences, honoris causa, was conferred on Raoul Bott by McGill University in 1987. Much of the work to make this happen was done by Carl Herz. Some of the author's personal recollections of both professors are included, along with some context for the awarding of this degree and ample historical tangents. Some cultural aspects occurring in the addresses are elaborated on, primarily, the Canadian engineer's iron ring. This paper also reprints both the convocation address of Raoul Bott and the presentation of Carl Herz on that occasion.Comment: An edited and reformatted version of this paper, with an additional photo, will appear in a volume dedicated to Raoul Bott. The author hopes to expand on some aspects of this preprint in future version

Ante Graovac – Life and Works

Ivan Gutman, Biserka Pokrić, Damir Vukičević (Eds.) Ante Graovac – Life and Works Mathematical Chemistry Monographs, Vol. 16 Faculty of Science, University of Kragujevac, Kragujevac (Serbia), 2014 306 + IV pages ◦ ISBN 978-86-6009-021-0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Vitaly Ginzburg and High Temperature Superconductivity: Personal Reminiscences

I offer some personal reminiscences from the period of 1976-1983, when I was a M. Sc. and then a Ph.D. student in Vitaly L. Ginzburg's High Temperature Superconductivity group at the P.N. Lebedev Institute in MoscowComment: To be published in proceedings of the Notre Dame Workshop on the Possibility of Room Temperature Superconductivity, June 2005 v.2: an apposite epigraph adde

Melnikov's approximation dominance. Some examples

We continue a previous paper to show that Mel'nikov's first order formula for part of the separatrix splitting of a pendulum under fast quasi periodic forcing holds, in special examples, as an asymptotic formula in the forcing rapidity.Comment: 46 Kb; 9 pages, plain Te

Quantum invariants of periodic three-manifolds

Let p be an odd prime and r be relatively prime to p. Let G be a finite p-group. Suppose an oriented 3-manifold M-tilde has a free G-action with orbit space M. We consider certain Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev SU(2) invariants w_r(M). We will give a fomula for w_r(M) in terms of the defect of M-tilde --> M and the number of elements in G. We also give a version of this result if M and M-tilde contain framed links or colored fat graphs. We give similar formulas for non-free actions which hold for a specified finite set of values for r.Comment: 19 pages. Published copy, also available at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/GTMon2/paper9.abs.htm