Top new questions this week:
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A question about the history of the maths classroom (which I hope isn't off topic).
The idea of using a chalky stone to write graffiti diagrams on a dark plastered wall (marks that could be washed off ...
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Donald E. Knuth reports in his: TAOCP: Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms (3rd ed.) in $\S1.2.4$: Integer Functions and Elementary Number Theory: Exercise 38 that this result:
$$\sum_{0 \mathop \le k \...
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I am interested in looking up P. G. Tait's flawed proof of the four-colour theorem, published in 1880. The citation that I have seen is:
P. G. Tait, On the colouring of maps, Proc. Roy. Soc. ...
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In an introductory course on PDE's I got as a project to prove and present a version of Hopf's (boundary) lemma. Namely:
Let $\Omega \subset R^{d}$ be an non-empty open connected set with a
twice ...
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Who came up with the name "Manhattan distance" (for the distance between two points as measured by the sum of the horizontal and vertical distances, as opposed to the length of the straight ...
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While Marie Skłodowska's husband, Pierre Curie, died in a traffic accident, she died of cancer. Various sources claim that the radiation she got during their experiments might have contributed ...
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In the 17th century Netherlands, could the astronomers, or sailors trained in stellar navigation, predict either total or partial (at least 40% obscured) solar eclipses over the the town of Aardenburg ...
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Greatest hits from previous weeks:
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Years ago, I read a story about a mathematician who found a numerical counterexample to some conjecture long believed to be true. He gave a talk during which he didn't utter a single word but simply ...
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As discussed in this answer https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/77691/667 there are several common conventions for the notation $[q]$ of a physical quantity $q$.
However, I often see people to put ...
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German (and Austrian) scientists of the late 19th - early 20th centuries seem to have been the backbone of most of modern physics - namely quantum theory/mechanics. The following are a few predominant ...
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I was studying Aristotle's laws of motion and comparing them to Newton's. He states that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones. I really can't understand how he could have committed such a ...
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I am trying to equate the famous Stephen Hawking to some of our other famous scientists and noted that the vast majority have an associated equation with their name. As for example Einstein was the ...
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Liouville published Galois' work a decade after the death of this singular mathematician. Are there other cases of results being rescued by the mathematical community long after their authors were ...
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It has been said that the invention of zero was a great leap forward, not only in abstract understanding, but in the ability to introduce place value notation and do computations; computing using ...
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Can you answer these questions?
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If Maxwell's equations were experimentally found on Earth such as Faradays law, coulombs law , and worked in the Earth's frame of reference, then why did people believe them to be valid in the aether'...
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How did mathematicians interpret quartic equations and fourth powers before Descartes propose to perform elementary arithmetic on line segments?
I ask this because it seems strange to me that ...
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The interesting Cosmic Elk article Eclipses in Siam (now Thailand) History and Legends says:
While the Siamese ambassadors and their entourage were visiting ship yards
and armouries and making ...
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