Top new questions this week:
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A perfect number is a positive integer that is equal to the sum of its positive divisors, excluding the number itself. The first five perfect numbers are 6, 28, 496, 8128, and 33550336.
Nicomachus ...
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Question Why is Dirac delta named after Dirac when the concept was already over two centuries old? notes the Dirac delta function effectively appeared centuries before Dirac. This was long before the ...
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I get an impression from this enyclopedia entry
that the primary source of the Boltzmann entropy equation $S = k \log W$ might be
1866, Über die Mechanische Bedeutung des Zweiten Hauptsatzes der ...
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Do you know how the values were measured and if they where determined by particular conditions/ restraints? They can be put to 1 (or to any values, I suppose); what escapes me is why 1/ε × μ must be ...
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I'm trying to compute the value of G from Cavendish's own observations. I get $G_{Cav}=5.27501×10^{−10}$ which is 8 times bigger than the accepted value of $G_{True}=6.67430×10^{−11}$. Do you see ...
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There is conflicting opinion as to who was Hardy's Tripos coach. The Wikipedia page on Hardy claims it was R. A. Herman, a claim that appears to be backed up by Leonard Roth in his article "Old ...
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This is a request for help (with examples, as described below) with a talk I giving to graduate students regarding the dynamics of mathematical research among mathematicians and the development of key ...
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Greatest hits from previous weeks:
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I remember a video, perhaps a Numberphile episode where a mathematician was described who would simply move in to the home of a collaborator with which they were engaged to so that they could work ...
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This may be quite a broad question, but lately I've been wondering about the history behind polynomials. Nowadays these are pretty much the simplest kind of functions to work with, but I'd like to ...
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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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I would like to know what is considered to be the first electronic digital computer.
A literature ambiguous on this. I found these claims:
ENIAC - a computer constructed by Mr. Eckert and Mr. ...
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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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There is one historic black and white portrait of Évariste Galois that is often used [1]. However there are a number of more recent colorful portraits that imagine him to be anything from straw blond[...
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I've heard it claimed Galileo said or wrote:
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered. The point is to discover them.
Where did he say this?
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