Edward Nelson (May 4, 1932 – September 10, 2014) was a professor in the Mathematics Department at Princeton University. He was known for his work on mathematical physics and mathematical logic. In mathematical logic, he was noted especially for his internal set theory, and his controversial views on ultrafinitism and the consistency of arithmetic. He also wrote on the relationship between religion and mathematics. Nelson was born in Decatur, Georgia. He received his Ph.D. in 1955 from the University of Chicago, where he worked with Irving Segal. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1956 to 1959. He held a position at Princeton University starting in 1959, attaining the rank of professor there in 1964 and retiring in 2013. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He died in Princeton, New Jersey on September 10, 2014. Nelson made contributions to the theory of infinite-dimensional group representations, the mathematical treatment of quantum field theory, the use of stochastic processes in quantum mechanics, and the reformulation of probability theory in terms of non-standard analysis. For many years he worked on mathematical physics and probability theory, and retained a residual interest in these fields, particularly in possible extensions of stochastic mechanics to field theory. In 1950, Nelson formulated a popular variant of the four color problem. What is the chromatic number, denoted \chi, of the plane? In more detail, what is the smallest number of colors sufficient for coloring the points of the Euclidean plane in such a way that no two points of the same color are unit distance apart? We know by simple arguments that 4 ≤ χ ≤ 7. The problem was introduced to a wide mathematical audience by Martin Gardner in his October 1960 Mathematical Games column. The chromatic number problem, also now known as the Hadwiger–Nelson problem, was also a favorite of Paul Erdős, who mentioned it frequently in his problems lectures. In the later part of his career, he worked on mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics. One of his goals was to extend IST (Internal Set Theory—a version of a portion of Abraham Robinson's non-standard analysis) in a natural way to include external functions and sets, in a way that provides an external function with specified properties unless there is a finitary obstacle to its existence. Other work centered on fragments of arithmetic, studying the divide between those theories interpretable in Raphael Robinson's Arithmetic and those that are not; computational complexity, including the problem of whether P is equal to NP or not; and automated proof checking. In September 2011, Nelson announced that he had proved that Peano arithmetic was logically inconsistent. An error was found in the proof, and he retracted the claim.

Professor at Université du Québec en Outaouais, CA Education • 1971 M.Sc. (physics), University of Warsaw, Poland. • 1981 Ph.D. (theoretical physics), University of Warsaw, Poland. Research interests • Foundations of quantum mechanics. Quantum information. Violation of Bell inequalities  and completeness of quantum mechanics. • High energy scattering. Possibility of the violation of the optical theorem in spite of the unitarity of S matrix. • Search for the experimental evidence of the violation of the optical theorem in high energy hadron-hadron scattering in LHC. • Statistical analysis of the experimental data. Non parametric compatibility tests (purity tests).  Search for the fine structures in  time- series of  data. • Predictions of the quark model for the scattering of polarized initial beams.  (Ph.D. Thesis and related publications). • Group theory. Contractions of Lie groups and their representations. (M.Sc. Thesis and related publications)

I am currently engaged in research projects in several fields. These include: Statistical Physics: Foundational issues, non-equilibrium methods, generalized statistics of Renyi and Tsallis, applications to econophysics, multifractals. Quantum Mechanics: Feynman's path integral, geometric phases, foundations, 't Hooft's quantization proposal, supersymmetric QM,. Quantum Field Theory and Particle Physics: Functional integral, particle oscillations and mixing, defect mediated phase transitions, topological defects. Education Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics, DAMTP University of Cambridge, UK M.Sc. in Theoretical Physics, Mathematical Tripos, Part III, DAMTP University of Cambridge, UK Ing (= M.Sc.) in Condensed Matter Physics, FNSPE-CTU, Prague, CZ

Sabine Hossenfelder received her PhD from the University of Frankfurt, Germany, in 2003. She worked as a postdoc at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and later at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada. Sabine joined Nordita in September 2009. Sabine's main research interest is physics beyond the standard model, with a special emphasis on the phenomenology of quantum gravity. This still young research field brings together experimentalists and theorists and connects many different areas, from cosmology and astrophysics over neutrino physics to particle colliders and high precision measurements. Her contributions are focused on the role of Lorentz-invariance and locality, which might be altered in the fundamental to-be-found theory of quantum gravity and be accessible to experiment. Sabine has collaborators at Perimeter Institute in Canada, at the University of Sussex, at SISSA in Trieste, and the MPI in Potsdam, Germany. At Nordita, she has organized a workshop on "Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity" in summer 2010 that was well attended by Nordic and international participants.

Werner A. Hofer was born in Salzburg, Austria. He is a Royal Society University Research Fellow (since 2003) and Professor of Chemistry and Physics in the Surface Science Research Centre of the University of Liverpool. He holds a Ph.D. (1999) from the Vienna University of Technology. Before joining the University of Liverpool in 2002, he held Research Fellow positions at University College London. Dr. Hofer was appointed as an Associate of CIAR's Nanoelectronics Program in 2007.Dr. Hofer's research is focused mainly on high-precision methods to simulate electron transport within a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). Initially, the application of perturbation theory centered on the modification of images due to different tip structures and atomic displacement in the close distance regime between surface and STM tip. He has shown that the method can be applied to practically all experimental situations, where STMs are used to analyze the geometric or electronic structure of metals, semiconductors, and molecules adsorbed on a conducting substrates. Recently, he has developed a scattering approach for the tunneling problem, which overcomes the problems related to perturbation theory, in particular the low-bias limit, imposed by a perturbative treatment. "Werner Hofer has a foot in both camps. He's an expert on the conventional theory behind the scanning tunnelling microscope, but maybe at heart he's a dissident." - Caroline Thompson

Yuji Hasegawa is working right now at the Atominstitut der Österreichischen Universitäten, Wien. His group is engaged in quantum optical experiments with neutrons. He studied Applied Physics at the University of Tokyo, Japan and then moved in Wien between 1991 and 1992 as exchange student between TU Wien and the University of Tokyo. During his exchange in Wien, he joined the group of Prof. Rauch´s neutron interferometer at the Atominstitut. Coming back to Tokyo, he ended his Ph.D. about interference experiments using high-energy photons, x-rays from synchrotron radiation, and neutrons. He became a Postdoc at the University of Tokyo and constructed a precise neutron optics (PNO) beam-line at the JRR-3M, Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI), Tokai, Japan.