The Signature of God in Medicine and Microbiology An Apologetic Argument for Declarative Design in the Discoveries of Alexander Fleming

In logic and reasoning, a signature indicates the presence of an author; likewise, the characteristics of staphylococci indicate the presence of a Creator. Staphylococci and its “kind” are common bacteria, particularly in colonized people.1 Staphylococcus aureus has a complex molecular mechanism of assembling its golden pigment, staphyloxanthin. The biosynthesis of staphyloxanthin is a stellar example of irreducible complexity. Similar to staphylococci, the life and works of Alexander Fleming show the fingerprints of Providence. The so-called “serendipitous” achievements of Fleming have contributed to modern medicine, convincing Fleming and others that God was at work in his life. Fleming recognized that his life’s discoveries and the “weaving” of events were more than chance; it was the invisible hand of God on his life and works. The molecular complexities of staphylococci mechanisms and the achievements of Fleming indicate the signature of a divine Designer who has placed his signature on his art piece, staphylococci

A modified lookdown construction for the Xi-Fleming-Viot process with mutation and populations with recurrent bottlenecks

Let $\Lambda$ be a finite measure on the unit interval. A $\Lambda$-Fleming-Viot process is a probability measure valued Markov process which is dual to a coalescent with multiple collisions ($\Lambda$-coalescent) in analogy to the duality known for the classical Fleming Viot process and Kingman's coalescent, where $\Lambda$ is the Dirac measure in 0. We explicitly construct a dual process of the coalescent with simultaneous multiple collisions ($\Xi$-coalescent) with mutation, the $\Xi$-Fleming-Viot process with mutation, and provide a representation based on the empirical measure of an exchangeable particle system along the lines of Donnelly and Kurtz (1999). We establish pathwise convergence of the approximating systems to the limiting $\Xi$-Fleming-Viot process with mutation. An alternative construction of the semigroup based on the Hille-Yosida theorem is provided and various types of duality of the processes are discussed. In the last part of the paper a population is considered which undergoes recurrent bottlenecks. In this scenario, non-trivial $\Xi$-Fleming-Viot processes naturally arise as limiting models.Comment: 35 pages, 2 figure

Hands Up Don\u27t Shoot

This image was created by Sam Fleming for Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities, volume 6 (2017), published by Macalester College.For more information, please visit the Tapestries journal home page. Copyright 2017, Samuel Fleming

Post-Racial

This image was created by Sam Fleming for Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities, volume 6 (2017), published by Macalester College.For more information, please visit the Tapestries journal home page. Copyright 2017, Samuel Fleming

Unite or Die

This image was created by Sam Fleming for Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities, volume 6 (2017), published by Macalester College.For more information, please visit the Tapestries journal home page. Copyright 2017, Samuel Fleming

On the Origins of the Fleming-Mundell Model

Forty years ago, Marcus Fleming and Robert Mundell developed independent models of macroeconomic policy in open economies. Why do we link the two, and why do we call the result the Mundell-Fleming, rather than Fleming-Mundell model? Copyright 2003, International Monetary Fund

Carson

This image was created by Sam Fleming for Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities, volume 6 (2017), published by Macalester College.For more information, please visit the Tapestries journal home page. Copyright 2017, Samuel Fleming

Fleming-Viot processes : two explicit examples

The purpose of this paper is to extend the investigation of the Fleming-Viot process in discrete space started in a previous work to two specific examples. The first one corresponds to a random walk on the complete graph. Due to its geometry, we establish several explicit and optimal formulas for the Fleming-Viot process (invariant distribution, correlations, spectral gap). The second example corresponds to a Markov chain in a two state space. In this case, the study of the Fleming-Viot particle system is reduced to the study of birth and death process with quadratic rates.Comment: 17 pages, 1 figure. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1312.244

On Zero-Sum Stochastic Differential Games

We generalize the results of Fleming and Souganidis (1989) on zero sum stochastic differential games to the case when the controls are unbounded. We do this by proving a dynamic programming principle using a covering argument instead of relying on a discrete approximation (which is used along with a comparison principle by Fleming and Souganidis). Also, in contrast with Fleming and Souganidis, we define our pay-off through a doubly reflected backward stochastic differential equation. The value function (in the degenerate case of a single controller) is closely related to the second order doubly reflected BSDEs.Comment: Key Words: Zero-sum stochastic differential games, Elliott-Kalton strategies, dynamic programming principle, stability under pasting, doubly reflected backward stochastic differential equations, viscosity solutions, obstacle problem for fully non-linear PDEs, shifted processes, shifted SDEs, second-order doubly reflected backward stochastic differential equation