Maty's Biography of Abraham De Moivre, Translated, Annotated and Augmented

November 27, 2004, marked the 250th anniversary of the death of Abraham De Moivre, best known in statistical circles for his famous large-sample approximation to the binomial distribution, whose generalization is now referred to as the Central Limit Theorem. De Moivre was one of the great pioneers of classical probability theory. He also made seminal contributions in analytic geometry, complex analysis and the theory of annuities. The first biography of De Moivre, on which almost all subsequent ones have since relied, was written in French by Matthew Maty. It was published in 1755 in the Journal britannique. The authors provide here, for the first time, a complete translation into English of Maty's biography of De Moivre. New material, much of it taken from modern sources, is given in footnotes, along with numerous annotations designed to provide additional clarity to Maty's biography for contemporary readers.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000268 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Adjoint exactness

Plato's ideas and Aristotle's real types from the classical age, Nominalism and Realism of the mediaeval period and Whitehead's modern view of the world as pro- cess all come together in the formal representation by category theory of exactness in adjointness (a). Concepts of exactness and co-exactness arise naturally from ad- jointness and are needed in current global problems of science. If a right co-exact valued left-adjoint functor ( ) in a cartesian closed category has a right-adjoint left- exact functor ( ), then physical stability is satis ed if itself is also a right co-exact left-adjoint functor for the right-adjoint left exact functor ( ): a a . These concepts are discussed here with examples in nuclear fusion, in database interroga- tion and in the cosmological ne structure constant by the Frederick construction

Francis Bacon and the Pragmatic Theory of Forms

A summary of Francis Bacon's ontology of nature followed by a pragmatic reading of his theory of 'Forms', concluding that Bacon construed the mark of a true form to be its usefulness (or, as he put it when insisting upon the necessity of usefulness to the very being of a form, 'These two directions, the one active and the other contemplative, are one and the same thing; and what in operation is most useful, that in knowledge is most true.')

Cardozo and the Upper-Court Myth

There has recently been published a volume, Selected Writings of Benjamin N. Cardozo, which every thoughtful lawyer and judge will want ready at hand. It will repay constant re-reading. It includes nearly all Cardozo\u27s extra-judicial writings, notably The Nature of the Judicial Process, first published in 1921, and The Growth of the Law, first published in 1924. In these two books, one of our most eminent appellate judges set forth his legal philosophy. More important, he showed how this philosophy aided him in his judicial work, and, in that connection, disclosed some of the intimate details of upper-court techniques. I say more important because, before Cardozo, no judge, with the exception of Holmes, had been similarly candid. Cardozo\u27s frankness emboldened others, lawyers and judges, to be less diffident in thinking about and commenting on courthouse ways

The discovery of lymphatic system as a turning point in medical knowledge: Aselli, Pecquet and the end of hepatocentrism

In this paper, I would like to analyse the impact of the discovery of lymphatic system on the development of the modern conception of human body. The discovery of lymphatics, as that of blood circulation, has in fact questioned important tenets of Galen's anatomo-physiology. Galen defended a 'dualistic conception' of the blood: he distinguished two different systems, the hepatic-venous system and the cardio-arterial one. The liver played a pivotal role because it was believed to transform the chyle received by the portal vein into venous blood. The discovery of lymphatics challenged this view: 17th-century anatomical dissections and experiments, starting with the discovery of milky veins by Gaspare Aselli (1581-1625) and the studies on thoracic duct by Jean Pecquet (1622-1674), irrefutably showed that the chyle does not pour out in the liver and that, consequently, the liver does not produce blood

The Real Conflict Between Science and Religion: Alvin Plantinga’s Ignoratio Elenchi

By focussing on the logical relations between scientific theories and religious beliefs in his book Where the Conflict Really Lies, Alvin Plantinga overlooks the real conflict between science and religion. This conflict exists whenever religious believers endorse positive factual claims to truth concerning the supernatural. They thereby violate an important rule of scientific method and of common sense, according to which factual claims should be endorsed as true only if they result from validated epistemic methods or sources