Top new questions this week:
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Robert Peary writes in his book The North Pole:
The instruments used in taking
observations for latitude may be either a sextant and an artificial
horizon, or a small theodolite. Both these ...
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Since Euler's result on the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem appears to be the first known graph theoretical result I was wondering if any mathematicians after Euler and before Hamilton commented ...
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Was there a specific reason that prevented researchers in boolean algebra to invent such quantifiers in the flexible format that are known today earlier?
Since the compact symbols for multiplication ...
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The quicksort algorithm is based on recursively choosing an element to partition the array. In every modern exposition that I've seen, this element is called the "pivot".
However, as far as ...
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From the questions on some of Gauss' philosophical ideas here at HSM stackexchange it's clear that Gauss had some major philosophical ideas that despite their profundity don't seem to have had much ...
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By far, looking at several curriculums of High School/First-Year Undergraduate physics. The curriculum always starts with Mechanics, moves into Electricity/Electromagnetism and ends with Modern ...
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Biology nowadays is filled with mathematics. Indeed, the field of mathematical biology is huge, and shows no sign of decay. But the mathematisation of biology is, to my knowledge, a recent phenomenon -...
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Greatest hits from previous weeks:
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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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This comment cites Wikipedia in stating that, before the development of the modern-day subject of calculus (i.e. analysis), the term "calculus" referred to general mathematics.
Who first used the ...
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As I was reading some papers written by Schrödinger and Heisenberg back in 1920s, I noticed that the symbols they use such as the integral or summation sign or calligraphic letters are as if printed ...
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I am reading this article by Donald E. Knuth and get stuck by this sentence:
Our mathematical language continues to improve, just as “the d-ism of
Leibniz overtook the dotage of Newton” in past ...
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I heard Gauss's primary school teacher gave some busy-work to his class: to add all the numbers between 1 and 100 up. Gauss immediately wrote 5050. His teacher was shocked, so she told him to add up ...
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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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Where can I find a paper or reference that describes the timeline of measurements of the magnitude of the electron's electric charge.
For context, Millikan's oil drop experiment in 1908 determined the ...
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Can you answer this question?
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In Why are special functions special [Physics Today 54, 11 (2007); eprint], Michael Berry makes the following observations:
This continuing and indeed increasing reliance on special functions is a ...
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