Games with Incomplete Information

Prize Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 9, 1994.Game Theory; Incomplete Information

A Quantum Approach To Static Games Of Complete Information

We extend the concept of a classical two-person static game to the quantum domain, by giving an Hilbert structure to the space of classical strategies and studying the Battle of the Sexes game. We show that the introduction of entangled strategies leads to a unique solution of this game.Comment: 17 pages, Latex, to be published on Phys.Lett.A; revised versio

Elemental Fluorine for the Greener Synthesis of Life-Science Building Blocks

Fluorinated organic compounds are increasingly important in many areas of our modern lives, especially in pharmaceutical and agrochemical applications where the incorporation of this element can have a major influence on biochemical properties. The introduction of the carbon-fluorine bond into such systems is typically carried out using well established multistep, nucleophilic fluorination processes that usually lead to large waste streams. Despite the availability of alternative electrophilic fluorination methods which have found several applications on discovery scale, the direct transformation of C-H to C-F bonds on large scale is scarce. Elemental fluorine is the only electrophilic fluorinating reagent that is viable for manufacturing scale applications, but, in spite of the advances in this field in the past 25 years, there are only a handful of processes where it is used, most notably in the manufacturing of 5-fluorouracil. In this thesis the direct fluorination of several industrially relevant organic systems was investigated with an aim to provide optimised, high yielding and scalable processes that could be compared with existing manufacturing methods using a green chemistry metrics package developed by the EU IMI Chem21 consortium

Synthesis of 3-fluoro-oxindoles and phenyl fluoroacetic acid derivatives

Fluorinated heterocycles are potentially interesting compounds for the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industry. Fluorinated indole and oxindole derivatives are generally synthesised by late stage fluorination methodologies (Selectfluor™, NFSI). Here, a new method for the synthesis of 3-fluorooxindoles starting from 1-fluoro-2-nitrobenzenes and diethyl fluoromalonate is presented. The SNAr reaction is very efficient: 2-aryl-2-fluoromalonates are obtained in quantitative yields and are used without any purification in the hydrolysis step. Following esterification and reduction 3-fluorooxindoles are obtained in moderate yield. The reduction is the most challenging step in the reaction sequence, as the most commonly used metal based techniques (catalytic hydrogenation, dissolving metals) eliminate the benzylic fluorine. This is the first reported example of aromatic nucleophilic substitution using fluoromalonates and is a simple and potentially scalable route to 2-aryl-2-fluoroacetic acids and derivatives. As the anion derived from diethyl fluoromalonate is a weak nucleophile, only fluorobenzenes with strong deactivating groups are suitable substrates for this reaction

Decision Theory

A book chapter (about 4,000 words, plus references) on decision theory in moral philosophy, with particular attention to uses of decision theory in specifying the contents of moral principles (e.g., expected-value forms of act and rule utilitarianism), uses of decision theory in arguing in support of moral principles (e.g., the hypothetical-choice arguments of Harsanyi and Rawls), and attempts to derive morality from rationality (e.g., the views of Gauthier and McClennen)

Between Utopia and Dystopia: The Labilities of Nationalism in Eastern Europe

Also CSST Working Paper #90.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51256/1/490.pd