# All Questions

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19 views

### Are there any important scientific discoveries, or inventions, that could have been made much earlier in history?

It is often said that science mainly builds upon what was already there. If scientific progress is efficient, then new discoveries and inventions are made quickly, as soon as new information comes in. ...
12 views

### What did G.H. Hardy teach Ramanujan?

Ramanujan didn't know modern mathematics. he lacked idea regarding analysis. I found in Wikipedia- Hardy tried his best to fill the gaps in Ramanujan's education and to mentor him in the need for ...
25 views

### Did Newton invent convex hulls?

The convex hull of a set of points appears recognizably in a 1676 letter from Newton to Henry Oldenburg describing Newton polygons. Is there an earlier precedent for convex hulls or is this their ...
19 views

### When & How did people know the existence of air resistance?

As we know, Newton showed that the celestial bodies in the heaven and the objects on the earth obey the same laws of motion, through his laws of motion and gravitation. However, in order to know this, ...
29 views

### Where can I get early 20th century books on electronics and mathematics?

I have been searching for books on electronics and mathematics of early 20th century.I found a link which was released in 1950 but that was in russian language.Can I find these books in universities ...
44 views

### Is there any scientist whose work was never recognised and was underestimated?

This question may not have a clear cut answer, so sorry. A lot of people have contributed to the development of science (includes mathematics). I have read that Newton's popularity was powerful ...
76 views

### Is ancient Indians' knowledge of science valid?

I have seen claims by some people and articles that describe the contributions on ancient Indians (before colonization by British) in the field of Science (including mathematics). For example, it is ...
1k views

### Who discovered pigeonhole principle in mathematics?

The principle was used as early as late 1760s by Lagrange but are there any earlier uses of it in math?
83 views

### Plagiarism at the turn of 20th century

Have there have been any interesting cases of one person stealing another mathematician's results and publishing them as his own? In particular, are there any interesting cases of this happening in ...
230 views

### When did the concept of palindromic sequences first appear in mathematics?

I have been reading one of Lagrange's works where he mentions palindromic sequences in the context of Periodic continued fractions. I am wondering if that was the first time that palindromic sequences ...
32 views

### What are the context and motivation for Gauss's study of the “Pothenot problem”?

My question refers to p.307-335 of volume 8 of Gauss's werke, which are part of a section of volume 8 which deals with Gauss's applications of complex numbers for geometry. The pages mentioned are ...
42 views

### When was the speed of a bullet or cannon ball first measured?

I would assume that the early estimates were wildly off and wonder how this measurement was done.
28 views

### What was Lagrange's contribution to the Knights Tour Problem?

Did Lagrange made any noteworthy contribution to the Knights tour problem?
24 views

### Did Lagrange finish his law degree during the 1750s?

According to this Lagrange enrolled in the University of Turin to study law in the 1750 but eventually shifted to math.
91 views

### When did trigonometry start using negative numbers?

I'm asking this question looking at the unit circle, and thinking that greek mathematicians didn't use negative numbers. Maybe that can give enough insight into what I'm asking?
133 views

### What were the not-so-convincing reasons for using the word “power” for power sets?

A footnote of Enderton's Elements of Set Theory (1977, page 4) for the definition of power set states that the reasons for using the word "power" in this context are not very convincing, but the ...
38 views

### Did Lagrange started studying mathematics in 1752 or 1753?

Some articles indicate that he started studying maths "after reading an article by Edmund Halley" in 1753 but in this paper it is claimed that he started studying mathematics in 1752
34 views

### Where did Krull dimension and zero-dimensional ideals come from?

I am trying to comprehend an article about primary decomposition of ideals. Zero - dimensional ideals are quite emphasized there. I wonder where zero - dimensional ideals come from, what is the ...
61 views

### Was Euler aware of Lagrangian mechanics?

In the book'The Road to Reality' Penrose claims that Euler was aware of Lagrangian mechanics, is there any evidence that this statement is true?
66 views

### Superscripts and constants in Diophantus’ Arithmetica

Diophantus’ notation for higher powers of the unknown includes a superscript, usually written as a lowercase or uppercase upsilon - e.g., $\Delta^{\upsilon}$ as the square. It is not clear to me ...
69 views

### Was Lagrange aware of Hamiltonian mechanics?

In the book'The Road to Reality' Penrose claims that Joseph Lagrange was aware of Hamiltonian mechanics, is there any evidence that this statement is true?
48 views

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### Dirac and proton-electron annihilation

Wikipedia says: Robert Oppenheimer argued strongly against the proton being the negative-energy electron solution to Dirac's equation. He asserted that if it were, the hydrogen atom would rapidly ...
52 views

### Who is Wanner from Rosenrock-Wanner (ROW) methods?

I've spent some time with a search engine trying to find out about Wanner, a person whose surname is mentioned in the name of Rosenbrock-Wanner (ROW) methods primarily used for iteratively solving ...
82 views

### What is the explanation of rope's strength in Galileo's Two New Sciences?

I'm reading Galileo's Two New Sciences. But as other Scientific Book it is hard. I am having trouble in First day, where SIMPLICO asks this question(Page 7): "But how can one make a rope one ...
84 views

### What is the historical basis for the length of a sidereal year?

It is understandable that the length of a solar year can be found out using the time of solstices. But how did they find the length of a year with respect to the stars?
65 views

### Chronology of proofs of cubic and biquadratic reciprocity laws

I just want to check if anybody knows a website where one can find a chronology of proofs of more difficult reciprocity theorems (such as the cubic and biquadratic cases) similar to the (already ...
56 views

### What did Hans Bethe think of von Neumann's quantum logic?

Nobel laureate Hans Bethe was a friend of mathematician-physicist John von Neumann, and he once said: "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species ...
114 views

### Pairs of Mathematicians

In Hilbert by Reid, it is noted that Hilbert and Minkowski were great friends and often worked together on problems, seminars, and lectures. This is a similar relationship to the partnership between ...
87 views

### Who first proved the “acute angle principle” in fixed point theory?

After getting such an informative response on my first question, I have another theorem discussed in our lecture who´s origin I am interested in (sometimes called the "acute angle principle"): ...
192 views

### What is the original source for Einstein's description of entanglement as “Spooky Action at a Distance”?

Try as I may, I cannot find the original source where Einstein described entanglement as "Spooky Action at the Distance." The work "spooky" is not in the 1935 EPR paper, which was written in English ...
61 views

### History of Reciprocity Laws

Does anybody know a freely available overview of the history of Reciprocity Laws, especially the Cubic and Biquadratic ones? Wikipedia I know about Franz Lemmermeyer's book "Reciprocity Laws", but ...
71 views

### Was the width of the Atlantic first determined in 1584?

In Eclipse: Journeys to the Dark Side of the Moon by Frank Close, it is stated that the 1584 lunar eclipse was used to determine the width of the Atlantic, by measuring the times in London and in ...
112 views

### Why did Linnaeus equate the phoenix, the mythical bird, with Phoenix, a palm genus?

I've been reading about the "paradoxa" section of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, where he debunk some of the more far fetched ideas about animals. Wikipedia includes this translation of what ...
200 views

### Why didn't the number zero (0) have a Roman numeral of its own?

I heard that the Romans never had the concept of zero nor a numeral to represent it in their system of mathematics. So, first, the number zero was invented by the Babylonians from India, but was ...
49 views

### Any idea on how Lagrange came up with similar functions concept in (proto)group theory?

Lagrange defines "similar functions" as functions of the roots of an equation where they change values only at the same kind of permutations of the roots. What's a possible predecessor of the idea of ...
5k views

### Why do we call Tycho Brahe by his first name?

Why do we use the fist name in Tychonic system or Tycho's comet of 1577, instead of using the last name of Tycho Brahe? For comparison, we have the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican system. I am ...
92 views

### When did Dehn start to work on Hilbert's third problem?

According to this wiki article, Dehn solved Hilbert's third problem within a year. Did Dehn start to work on the third problem after Hilbert's talk? Since Dehn is Hilbert's student, they were likely ...
59 views

### How Bohr guessed the quantisation rule?

We all know Bohr's Quantization rule as L=nh/2pi. How did Bohr derive this? If it is a guess, what is the reason behind choosing h/2pi and not some other constant? ...
40 views

### Who first used {} as a notation of an empty set? [duplicate]

Maybe Frege? If so, in what book did he use that notation?