# All Questions

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### Did a boat full of Louis XIV's Jesuits and some Siamese dignitaries plan on seeing a solar eclipse on May 17, 1687

The interesting Cosmic Elk article Eclipses in Siam (now Thailand) History and Legends says: While the Siamese ambassadors and their entourage were visiting ship yards and armouries and making ...
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### Could 17th century astronomers in the Netherlands predict solar eclipses a few months in advance?

In the 17th century Netherlands, could the astronomers, or sailors trained in stellar navigation, predict either total or partial (at least 40% obscured) solar eclipses over the the town of Aardenburg ...
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### Blackboards as math tech!

A question about the history of the maths classroom (which I hope isn't off topic). The idea of using a chalky stone to write graffiti diagrams on a dark plastered wall (marks that could be washed off ...
107 views

### What are the definitive experiments/phenomena which motivate quantum mechanics?

The double slit experiment is usually given as the foremost example of a physical experiment that requires quantum mechanics to satisfactorily explain. However, every account i've seen of it (such as ...
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### Fourth powers and quartic equations before Descartes

How did mathematicians interpret quartic equations and fourth powers before Descartes propose to perform elementary arithmetic on line segments? I ask this because it seems strange to me that ...
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### No distance in Euclid

The mathematical concept of distance is fundamental in all mathematics and, since Bernard Riemann’s definition of manifolds, is also foundational in geometry and geometry of physics. Contrary to a ...
56 views

### Where can I find the complete papers of abstracts published by P. G. Tait in Proc. Roy. Soc. Edinburgh in 1880?

I am interested in looking up P. G. Tait's flawed proof of the four-colour theorem, published in 1880. The citation that I have seen is: P. G. Tait, On the colouring of maps, Proc. Roy. Soc. ...
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### How did the first astronomers define what a planet is?

What is the origin of the term "planet" and how did astronomers first define the term?
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### When did physicists begin using the symbol $G$ for Newton's gravitational constant?

The Cavendish experiment was equivalent to measuring $G,$ Newton's gravitational constant. However, because physicists at the time did not write equations in the same way we do now, Cavendish didn't ...
54 views

### What was Newton's statement of the universal law of gravitation?

Newton explained the inverse square law in Principia. On looking through an English translation, though, I'm having difficulty pulling out a single quote that is Newton's clearest statement of the ...
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### What are the earliest known proofs that planimeters 'work'?

The dates of various physical implementations of planimeters are pretty well known. I'm interested in discovering when formal mathematical proofs were published that any given design does calculate ...
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### How long have parenthesis (brackets) been used?

If you look at a work such as Bertrand Russel's Principia Mathematica there are no brackets at all. So are brackets a recent invention? Newton used to draw a line above long expressions to group terms....
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### Kurt Gödel: a biography

I'm looking for a well-written biographical book about Kurt Gödel. Any titles you'd recommend?
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### Has the heyday of mathematical formulae ended?

I have a strong emotional reaction when I read the works of Euler. I have seen many extremely beautiful and intriguing identities in the notebook of Ramanujan, so much so that I think he is indeed a ...
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### Why are quaternions more popular than tessarines despite being non-commutative?

Is this simply because of marketing, hype, etc? The bicomplex numbers (especially tessarines) look just great being commutative and all. Images source:https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?...
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### How did Dyck originally state and prove his theorem in topology about the connected sum of a torus and projective plane?

Dyck's theorem in topology is sometimes stated as follows: the connected sum of a torus and projective plane is homeomorphic to the connected sum of three projective planes. Certainly, this is the ...
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### Why is Freeth's nephroid called a nephroid?

A nephroid is an epycloid that can be generated by rolling a circle on the outside of a circle with doubled radius. It was called by Richard Proctor (1878) because its shape looks like a kidney (see ...
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### Is there an English translation of Newton’s De Analysi?

I’m looking for an English translation of Newton’s De analysi. (Alas, my Latin is weak.) I’m rather dismayed by the fact that I can’t appear to find one. How is it possible that one of the most ...
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### Who extended the Banach fixed point theorem from the context of normed spaces to the context of metric spaces?

It is well known that Banach's fixed-point theorem was initially conceived as a fixed-point theorem for applications defined in normed spaces (see [1]). This theorem was conceived in 1922 by Stefan ...
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### Has Daniel Bernoulli's 1764 paper on organ pipe acoustics been translated into English?

The full title: RECHERCHES PHYSIQUES MÉCANIQUES ET ANALYTIQUES SUR LE SON ET SUR LE TONS DES TUYAUX D’ORGUES DIFFÉREMMENT CONSTRUITS Link to a pdf: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011812546 Some ...
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### What is the Boltzmann contribution to the theory of “statistical ensemble”?

In the book "Ludwig Boltzmann, the man who trusted atoms"by C.Cercignani, I read about the thesis according to which it was Boltzmann, not Gibbs who first introduced the concept of "...
By division algorithm i mean $a = bq + r$