Top new questions this week:
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Did Newton write down his process of building a reflector telescope? Even with modern knowledge and technology, building one is no easy task so I'm curious of exactly what Newton did.
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It is natural for physicists to consider the group $SO(3)$. Presumably, $SU(2)$ came into physics because of quantum mechanics. How did people realize that when studying rotation of a physical system, ...
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Wikipedia says:
In 2006, it was discovered that Carl Gustav Jacobi had solved the assignment problem in the 19th century, and the solution had been published posthumously in 1890 in Latin.
The ...
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In Saunders Mac Lane's autobiography he described how he visited, I think Königsberg, then the centre of mathematics in Germany. He also reported he that he saw Hitler somewhere and that he wished ...
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Who had direct inside knowledge of the canon through the alleged secret oral tradition? Some possible examples that have been alluded to include Pythagoras, Plato, Euclid, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, ...
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Greatest hits from previous weeks:
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This is by far one of the most challenging and popular HSM questions on the Net. Proofs are, countless discussions about it in math forums. The answers only led to two theories, which Wikipedia does a ...
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Einstein's failure to win a Nobel until 1921, and that prize's not being awarded for his work on relativity, is generally ascribed to these factors:
Lack of sufficient experimental proof for the ...
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In describing black body radiation Planck assumed that the energy that can be absorbed or emitted by charges is quantized, i.e. they can only absorb or emit certain quantities of energy. But it was ...
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It is commonly said (to children) that we have five senses: taste, sight, touch, smell, and hearing. The term "sixth sense" refers to something supernatural. But we do have more senses. Balance, for ...
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The symbol $\triangleq$ is sometimes used in mathematics (and physics) for a definition. It is instantiated for instance in the Unicode Character 'DELTA EQUAL TO' (U+225C).
The notation $t ...
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I knew about linear approximations, quadratic approximations and the use of Taylor polynomials to approximate a function. Furthermore, I was aware of other applications of Taylor polynomials and the ...
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In a lot of places I find this quote from Feynman:
I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.
However, I cannot find any source of where it ...
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