2003 Awards for Excellence

2003 Awards for Excellence

2003 Awards for Excellence

Uri FidelmanInstitute of Technology, Haifa, Israel and Emek Izrael College, Israel

is the recipient of the Norbet Wiener Award for Excellence for his paper

"Temporal and simultaneous processing in the brain: a possible cellular basis of cognition"

which appeared in Kybernetes, Vol. 31 Nos 3/4, 2002

Uri Fidelman obtained a MSc degree in mathematics at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. His interest in the foundation of mathematics caused him to wonder why different mathematicians have contradicting views about foundation of mathematics, and what is legitimate mathematics. It occurred to him that the reason may be the difference in the structure of the brain of these different mathematicians. He did his PhD thesis at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, and devoted it to solve this problem. He taught students at various foundation AI schools in mathematics, tested them with hemispheric tests, and correlated the scores. He found that the left cerebral hemisphere is related to the establishing of mathematics on serial concepts, and the ability to learn the concepts of ordinal numbers of potential infinity. On the other hand, the right hemisphere is related to the establishing of mathematics on set theoretical concepts, and the ability to learn the concepts of cardinal numbers and of actual infinity. By this experimental method he found that the paradoxes in the foundation of mathematics are due to a cognitive and neurological conflict between the left- and the right-hemisphere. He has extended his work to a hemispheric explanation of the existence of nominalist and platonist ontologies and to the biology of intelligence. Presently his research explains the duality in physics and the paradoxes of quantum mechanics by hemispheric difference since the interpretation of the sensory data, and by a conflict between the left- and right- hemispheric mechanisms. This explanation is, in fact, analogous to the explanation of the "duality" in the establishing of mathematics and the foundational paradoxes in mathematics.