Homogenization Footnotes @HomogenFootnote

(19n73): Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fᴏᴜʀɪᴇʀ, French mathematician, 1768-1830. He worked in Auxerre, in Paris, France, accompanied Bᴏɴᴀᴘᴀʀᴛᴇ in Egypt, was prefect in Grenoble, France, until the fall of Napoléon I, and worked in Paris again.

(43n23): I observed that differential geometers usually learn nothing about physics, and that they do not perceive that most of the physicists whom they meet suffer from a Comte complex.

(61n15): Which would lead me to complete my thesis, defended in April 1971. After that, I once asked my advisor if he could give me a problem to solve, and he answered that I was now on my own!

(28n21): I was expecting that it would be the case where the period was a square containing a circular inclusion half the size in area, but I was quite surprised that someone in the audience expressed the strange idea that more than one answer could be valid!

(46n36): My reason was to give a rational explanation for the efficiency of a formula guessed by Lᴀɴᴅᴀᴜ and Lɪғsʜɪᴛᴢ, whose arguments made absolutely no sense, since they "derived" it from another formula which was obviously false in general.

(1n2): Jesus of Nazareth is believed by Christians to be the (unique) son of God, and the messiah whom Jews were waiting for, hence its title Christ, which probably has that meaning in Greek. Of course, I consider that he was only human, and I often refer to him as the Teacher.

(24n2): However, I suggest that some "physicists" with a Comte complex do a bad job of trying to do mathematics instead of physics, because they usually fail from a mathematician's point of view and from the point of view of real physicists who do not suffer from a Comte complex.

(326n8, 2 of 2): Did he learn that real light is polarized, so that it is not about the scalar wave equation but about the Maxwell-Heaviside system? Did he learn that what is important about a ray of light is that it transports energy and momentum?

(326n8, 1 of 2): Lars Höʀᴍᴀɴᴅᴇʀ never seemed interested in developing mathematical tools for continuum mechanics or physics, as he did not work with systems!

(109n6): There is a factor in front of the bilinear term, inversely proportional to the Planck constant 𝘩, so that it is natural that 𝘩 appears in questions of interaction of light with matter. I find it silly that quantum mechanics makes 𝘩 appear everywhere!

(53n80): Those who switched back many years after to the obsolete term of parametrized measures may want to show that they were rewriting my text [98], and probably attributing all my ideas to their friends.

(16n57): To err is human, but to continue erring is diabolical.

(252n8): One of the dogmas in quantum mechanics is that the equations are linear, as if one wanted to hide from some of the students that their teacher might do research in quantum field theory, the nonlinear aspect of quantum mechanics!

(376n15): Of course, real light is not described by a scalar wave equation! One needs to use the Maxwell-Heaviside system, which explains what polarization is.

(31n38): If they were good enough to be students in Paris in the late 1960s, they would observe that the best students are expected to try to tackle hyperbolic problems for a while and that those who settle for elliptic/parabolic equations at least know that reality is elsewhere!

(102n16): That force is related to acceleration is a crucial observation of Nᴇᴡᴛᴏɴ, and it might be because people observed limiting velocities, due to friction effects, that one thought earlier that force was proportional to velocity.

402n28: What puzzles physicists is that "particles sometimes behave like waves" while it's only the oscillatory waves, ie those using high frequencies, which are described by a different effective equation which may or may not have a simple interpretation in terms of "particles".

(209n15): Felix Hᴀᴜsᴅᴏʀғғ, German mathematician, 1869-1942. He worked in Leipzig, in Greifswalf and in Bonn, Germany. He wrote literary and philosophical work under the pseudonym of Paul Mᴏɴɢʀᴇ.

(97n1): This mistake is common among mathematicians who try to become "applied" by speaking the language of engineers: they often show clearly to anyone who was well trained that they talk about questions that they do not understand.

(14n50 continued): and I expect that in most cases one would forget to count how many conjecture the result to be undecidable!