Ioan James

"Although the theory of s (s where the underlying space is a and the group operations are ) goes back to around 1870 the theory of topological groups in a more general sense seem not to have been considered until 1925 when and , independently, made the basic definitions, rather in the spirit of , and since then this too has developed into a major branch of . It was Weil (1937) who wrote the first definitive study of s and applied the theory to both s and topological groups. However the basic idea was already emerging early in the century, indeed the concepts of and were well understood by Weierstrass and by Cauchy before him."

"Although the main field of Laplace's research was , he also made important contributions to the and . In his (Analytical theory of probability) of 1812 he summarized, in a masterly introduction, all that was then known in the area of probability and its applications. This work introduces the technique known later as the Laplace transform, a simple and elegant method of solving s."

"Despite poor eyesight, Kepler was one of the pioneers of research into optics. He found a good approximation to the . Descartes, the discoverer of the precise law, said that Kepler was his true teacher in optics, who knew more about this subject than did any of those who preceded him. This research was published in his of 1611, which also contained an account of a new . Towards the end of his life he wrote a small work on the gauging of wine casks, which is regarded as one of the significant works in the ."

"is much more common than classical . It is estimated to affect about one in every three or four hundred of the general population. More than half a million people in the United Kingdom have some kind of disorder on the autistic spectrum, with over 200,000 of them having Asperger's syndrome. Disorders of the autistic spectrum are found much more often in men than in women, although this may be because women are better at compensating for some of their more noticeable features, being better at social relationships and less likely to exhibit narrow interest patterns."