# History of Science and Mathematics Stack Exchange Community Digest

## Top new questions this week:

### Why did Richard Bellman, creator of dynamic programing say: 1950s were not good years for maths?

Richard Bellman said : "The 1950s were not good years for mathematical research. We had a very interesting gentleman in Washington named Wilson. He was Secretary of Defense, and he actually had ...

history mathematics-social-history

### Where exactly did George Brown publish the first paper about Turnstile antennas?

In its most basic form the Turnstile antenna is two half-wave dipole antennas that are perpendicular and driven 90 degrees out of phase. For a recent review see Crossed Dipole Antennas: A review (also ...

physics reference-request electromagnetism electronics

## Greatest hits from previous weeks:

### When were vectors invented?

Encyclopedia Britannica says, In their modern form, vectors appeared late in the 19th century when Josiah Willard Gibbs and Oliver Heaviside (...) independently developed vector analysis to express ...

mathematics mathematical-physics

### Did Gauss find the formula for $1+2+3+\ldots+(n-2)+(n-1)+n$ in elementary school?

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 ...

mathematics mathematicians gauss

### Why is kg the standard unit for mass and not g in SI?

Why is $\mathrm{kg}$ the standard unit for mass and not $\mathrm{g}$? I know that there is the kilogramme des Archives which is a kilogram and not a gram. But originally on April 7, 1795 the gram was ...

physics units

### Who invented the mole?

Who invented, or first used, the concept of the mole? I did my own research and the closest I came was Avogadro’s constant, which was made not by Avogadro but rather by Jean Baptiste Perrin. However, ...

terminology chemistry units

### Arithmetic calculation before the 17th Century

Apparently Dijkstra wrote in an article in Datamation1 in 1977: It's very illuminating to think about the fact that some – at most four hundred – years ago, professors at European universities ...

mathematics

### What was the historical context of the development of Taylor series?

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 ...

mathematics

### Why didn't Aristarchus' theory of Heliocentrism stick?

This might be more a question for historians, but it's a question I've given some thought to. By using what was essentially Euclidean geometry, Aristarchus was able to calculate, with some measure ...

discoveries astronomy