Florentin Smarandache
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Florentin Smarandache (born December 10, 1954) is a Romanian-American writer and associate professor of mathematics and science at the University of New Mexico, Gallup, New Mexico.
Smarandache was born in Bălceşti, in the Romanian county of Vâlcea. According to autobiographical accounts, he was refused an exit visa by the Ceauşescu regime that would have allowed him to attend the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berkeley, California in 1986. He fled Romania in 1988, leaving behind his son and pregnant wife; after two years in refugee camps in Turkey, he immigrated to the United States in 1990. He was employed as a software engineer at a Honeywell facility in Phoenix, Arizona from 1990 to 1995 and was an adjunct professor at Pima Community College in Tucson from 1995 to 1997. He obtained a doctorate in mathematics from the State University of Chişinău, Moldova, in 1997 ([2], [3]). From 1997 to 2003 he was an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico, Gallup Branch [4]. He was promoted to Associate Professor of Mathematics in 2003.
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[edit] Writings
Smarandache has published material classified diversely as poems, translations, novels, dramas and fiction in Romanian, French, and English. Some of his literary and philosophical writings are described by him as paradoxical; indeed, Smarandache describes himself as a "leader of paradoxism". He claims to have invented a new approach to dialectics he calls neutrosophy. For instance, neutrosophic sets appear to be a generalization of fuzzy sets, in which a third possibility between membership and non-membership in a set (indeterminateness) is allowed.
In mathematics, he has written material under the rubric of number theory and statistics. His most representative work is in algebraic structures, non-Euclidean geometry, multiple-valued logic and specially information fusion that brought him invitation and sponsoring to lecture at the University of Berkeley, NASA Langley Research Center, NATO Advance Study Institute, etc.
An example are the Smarandache-Wellin numbers, where the n-th Smarandache-Wellin number is defined as the concatenation of the first n prime numbers written in decimal notation. The first Smarandache-Wellin numbers are 2, 23, 235, 2357, 235711, ... (sequence A019518 in OEIS).
As of November 27, 2004 Bowker's Books in Print [5] listed 134 published titles in under the name Florentin Smarandache. They were distributed in US by American Research Press but published by about 30 publishing houses around the world, among them Zayu Press, Bristol Banner Books, University of Kishinev Press, etc.
[edit] Outer-Art
Outer-Art is a term coined by Smarandache in the 1990s. He proposed creating the least artistic thing and calling it artwork. According to his manifesto:
- The Outer-Art movement means to make art as ugly as possible, as wrong as possible, or as bad as possible... and, generally speaking, as impossible as possible!
[edit] Smarandache hypothesis
According to Smarandache [1] "In this short paper, as an extension and consequence of Einstein-Podolski-Rosen paradox and Bell’s inequality, one promotes the hypothesis that: There is no speed barrier in the universe and one can construct arbitrary speeds, and also one asks if it's possible to have an infinite speed (instantaneous transmission)?" This hypothesis appears to contradict widely accepted claims concerning transmission of information, such as the no-communication theorem.
[edit] Dezert-Smarandache theory
As a variation of Dempster-Shafer theory (DST) of evidence, the Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT) of plausible and paradoxical reasoning allows to formally combine any kind of information (certain, uncertain, paradoxical). It was developed by Jean Dezert and Florentin Smarandache.
The DSmT is intended to fuse complex data/information fusion problems where conflicts (paradoxes) between sources become large and when the refinement of the frame of discernment is inaccessible because of the vague, relative, and imprecise nature of elements of the frame of discernment. The usefulness of this theory is starting to get ground, as the DST frame of discernment is a particular case of the hyper-power set and Dempster's rule if less mathematically exact than the DSmT Proportional Conflict Redistribution Rule 5.
[edit] Other contributions
Smarandache defined a type of geometrical structure which some have called "Smarandache geometries". Smarandache geometries are non-Euclidean, and sometimes partially Euclidean and partially non-Euclidean, geometries. They have at least one axiom which behaves in at least two different ways within the same space (validated and invalided, or only invalidated but in multiple distinct ways).
Howard Iseri constructed a model on a 2D-manifold for a particular such geometry, where Euclid's fifth postulate is replaced by various statements within the same geometric space.
[edit] Editorship
Smarandache is an associate editor of an alternative physics printed and online journal Progress in Physics, which was started in 2005 with the Mathematics Department at UNM-Gallup as its address.
Smarandache is also editor in chief of the International Journal of Applied Mathematics & Statistics , another printed international journal started in December 2003.
[edit] Notes and references
[edit] External links
Websites promoting work of Smarandache:
- Smarandache Notions Journal, Smarandache's home page at the University of New Mexico in Gallup, NM
- Outer-art An online gallery of paintings and photographs by Smarandache, from his website
- Profile of Florentin Smarandache This profile was written by Smarandache himself on the Ad Astra online project for the Romanian Scientific community. The information in this biography concerning Smarandache's leaving Romania comes from this source.
- mini-bio from allexperts.com
- Books by Smarandache from addall.com
Websites critical of work by Smarandache:
Other links:
- Out of Print books (from ProQuest books on demand)
- A public complaint by Smarandache about the reclassification of his work as General Mathematics by the moderators on the Cornell archive. Smarandache also appears to have been blacklisted by Mathematical Reviews which, although listing 75 of his mathematical publications, has not submitted all reviews on the theories cited above (number theory, neutrosophics, DSmT, etc), but many such theories fall in other categories such as Computer Science, Philosophy, Engineering, etc.
