Top new questions this week:
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A full professor teaching the history of mathematics at Masters level recently told a friend of mine that there was nothing of interest left to explore in the mathematics written in Latin over the ...
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My question is clearly related to this one, but my interest is not specifically in Heisenberg's result. To quote from Wikipedia.
A nonzero function and its Fourier transform cannot both be sharply ...
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I was reading about the discovery of Neptune when I realised that Caroline Herschel was still alive at the time. Neptune was discovered in September 1846. Caroline died in January 1848, more than a ...
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Who first suggested that the area enclosed by a closed path and the area enclosed by that same path traversed in reverse could be regarded as equal in magnitude but opposite in sign?
Cauchy must have ...
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I'm curious about Pfaff's problem and all the various mathematicians who have worked on it. From Wikipedia articles I was able to gather the following timeline of events.
In the modern language:
Pfaff'...
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Birkhoff and Rota, in their book Ordinary Differential Equations (4e), claim on p.55 that:
The concept of the adjoint of a linear operator, which originated historically in the search for integrating ...
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In article 23 of his first memoir on biquadratic residues, Gauss gave the first example of a binomial-type congruence, which is apparently a quite "deep" result - many authors relate it to ...
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Greatest hits from previous weeks:
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The ancient Greeks knew this fact. How about the chinese? If not, when did they realize that the earth is a sphere? By themselves or from other people?
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In an interview I recently saw with Joseph Agassi he said that:
...The teachers that kicked him out asked that it be written in his [Einstein's] report card that they have no complaint against him. ...
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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 recall reading in several sources the story about the letter "template" with which Edmund Landau used to answer individuals that sent him their "proofs" of Fermat's Last Theorem.....
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Note - this question was inspired by this questions on physics.SE.
Many (most) physical quantities are denoted with a single letter - latin or greek. For many, the letter chosen makes sense: $t$ for ...
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I'm very interested to know about historical development of power series, i.e.
$$\sum_{n=0}^{\infty}a_n(x-c)^n=a_0+a_1(x-c)+a_2(x-c)^2+\dots$$
What was the situation and historical context that ...
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Constructing houses, telescopes, and most other important projects requires shaping pieces to precise size, at perfect right angles, or to have flat surfaces. People today have all kinds of ways of ...
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Can you answer these questions?
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Now we generally think of the Platonic solids as being the regular convex polyhedra. And while the Ancient Greeks were aware of this solids as being particularly special, I don't believe that it is ...
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I am looking for a complete collection of fragments of Eudemus of Rhodes. He is considered to be the first historian of science. His fragments have given us a glimpse of how Greek mathematics ...
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