# All Questions

2,333 questions
6 views

### What is discovered first, electricity or electron?

It always bugs my mind to think which comes first, it feels like the egg or the chicken problem. When i was reading about the discovery of the electron i found that the charge to mass ratio of the ...
6 views

### Influence of Poincaré on Julia and Fatou

Poincaré was one of the major precursors of the modern theory of dynamical systems, notably through his famous memoir on the 3 body problem, and subsequent discovery of homoclinic intersections and ...
5 views

### Hydrogen electrode and its electrode potential

In electrochemistry, all electrode potentials are quoted with reference to the standard hydrogen electrode. Its value is assigned to be 0 volts. I have been searching for the origin of this convention ...
51 views

### Has ordering people along a Ape to Human diagram, as a measure of dehumanization for people in general, been validated in any way? [on hold]

Has ordering people along a Ape to Human diagram, as a measure of dehumanization for people in general, been validated in any way? Because it seems, if confronted with such a diagram and asking ...
4k views

### How was Lagrange appointed professor of mathematics so early?

It is well-known that in 1755 Lagrange was appointed Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Artillery School in Turin. He was 19. His work up until then involves correspondence with Euler. Was he ...
56 views

### Mellin's original paper on his transform

There is no link on wikipedia to his work. This is really a nice transform. There is coherent theory behind. I am curious what motivated him to invent this transform.
91 views

### When did people start to state and justify properties of arithmetical operations?

I have question regarding the history of the idea of founding mathematics (specially arithmetic) on a logical basis. What I'm interested in knowing is, at what point historically people started to ...
409 views

### Where did Ptolemy compare the Earth to the distance of fixed stars?

I read the following in C. S. Lewis, Miracles (page 77-8) The immensity of the universe is not a recent discovery. More than seventeen hundred years ago Ptolemy taught that in relation to the ...
37 views

### Bainbridge's test of mass-energy equivalence

Kenneth Bainbridge was an early pioneer of mass spectroscopy. The Wikipedia article about him says: He used this instrument to verify Albert Einstein's mass-energy equivalence, E = mc2 with a ...
91 views

### Material on the History of Mathematical Spaces

First and foremost, I am aware that a similar question has been asked here and has been touched upon elsewhere. I have found these discussions very compelling but a bit light on external reference, ...
46 views

### Apparent contradiction in Copernicus' Commentariolus

There seems to be a contradiction in the assumptions that Copernicus makes when attempting to explain the motion of the planets: http://dbanach.com/copernicus-commentarilous.htm Assumptions 1 and 3 ...
43 views

115 views

### Is this Heisenberg joke actually real? [closed]

This is the story 15 of the page Physics Jokes (emphasis mine): This is apparently a true story. It took place just outside of Munich, Germany. Heisenberg went for a drive and got stopped by a ...
49 views

### What was the structure of first course in sociology?

I read that Max Weber supported the anti-positivist approach to sociology in Ludwig Maxmilian University of Munich. So I want to know the academic structure of the first course he appealed for. I ...
73 views

### The convention for speakers to refer to themselves at the board with a single initial

I found an interesting question on Math SE asked by @KCd, but it is over four years old without a clear answer. Since it seems to be more on topic here than on Math SE, I thought to post it here in ...
1k views

### 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 ...
73 views

### Were notable physicists great at math or computing? [closed]

Were famous or popular physicists like Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Feynman predominantly mathematicians or scientists (computing, experimenting, engineering, etc.)? I am curious if people like the ...
50 views

### When did the term “order” come into use as the highest exponent in an expansion?

Answer(s) to the question What is a 3rd-order Fresnel lens? are disappointing to me, in that the term 3rd order does not refer to anything like a third-order series expansion. But this leads me to a ...
22 views

### Introduction of shape parameters in the formulation of probability distribution

I'm familiar with the definition of location, scale, and shape parameters, and the type of distributions they parametrized. I'm interested in understanding how shape parameters became part of the ...
32 views

### Who introduced concept of capacitance matrix

We know of two ways of representing voltage-charge relations of an assembly of conductors: $V_j=\sum P_iq_i$ and $Q_j=\sum C_iv_i$ Who introduced these equations for the first time and though one can ...
106 views

### What actually led Feynman to the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics?

It is commonly known that Feynman's path integral was inspired by Dirac's observation that the kernel is proportional to $\exp{i\hbar S}$. It was Feynman, however, who had the idea of expressing the ...
67 views

72 views

### How was the value of the electron's spin ($\pm \frac{\hbar}{2}$) first determined?

The value of the electron's spin is $\pm \frac{\hbar}{2}$. In the paper where Pauli introduces his Pauli matrices he already knows the value of spin. I'd imagine it was through the Ster-Gerlach ...
77 views

### Old geometry terminology

I was reading Ramsey's 1927 paper "A Contribution to the Theory of Taxation" and came across the following paragraph: "We have $\lambda_1 = \mu_1,\ldots,\lambda_m = \mu_m$, $m$ hyperplanes ($n-1$ ...
23 views

### How did Cassini measure the “Cassini state” of the Moon? What measurements were made and what did the data look like?

The Phys.org article Physicists provide first model of moon's rotational dynamics, accounting for the solid inner core describes the September 2018 paper by Christopher Stys and Mathieu Dumberry The ...
66 views

### The minimax theorem from 1928 to 1956

Minimax theorems are beautiful saddle-point results regarding conditions on a function $f$ under which $\max_x \min_y f(x,y) = \min_y \max_x f(x,y)$. In the common "normal form" game case, $x$ and $y$ ...
136 views

### Why is there little scholarship devoted to Book II of Newton's Principia?

Books I and III seem to receive the bulk of attention by Newton scholars, and historians more generally. However, I'm sure an in-depth study of Book II would shed light on Newton as a thinker -- for ...
155 views

### What is the origin of Arabic numerals

I was taught that the numerals {0,1,2,...,9} are from the Arab alphabet. But they look completely different from today's Arab letters. I wonder what is the origin of Arabic numerals? Edit: The web ...
140 views

### How did Einstein know the Avogadro Number?

Wikipedia says the Avogadro number was determined by Perrin in 1908. But Einstein used the value $$N=6\times 10^{23}$$ as early as 1905 in order to estimate the size of the fluctuations of an ...
66 views

### Did Bohr comment on Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics?

Bohm published his interpretation of quantum mechanics in 1952. Comments on Bohm's work from Einstein, Heisenberg und Pauli are cited in the corresponding wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/...
132 views

### What's that on Euler's head? Does the head covering shown in Emanuel Handmann 1753 painting signify scholarship?

This may be borderline off-topic but this is the only place that I can think of ask this particular question. I've always seen images of Leonhard Euler with a "hat" or head covering that is ...
34 views

### Does anyone know articles or books about what the notion of difficulty in science, especially physics?

In physics, many problems were known at their time to be very challenging, for example the notion of heat, or how to understand the ideal gaz law, or the phase transition criticial behaviors, etc. And ...
307 views

### Who are the top mathematicians who were ignored due to their unconventional approach?

A perfect example would be Srinivasa Ramanujan It is known that the conventional community throughout history have been close-minded towards great men of science and mathematics.(eg. Galileo) ...
71 views

### Meaning of a cryptic sentence by Gauss on “the mobility of figures in the hyperbolic plane”

G. Waldo Dunnington writes in pages 189-190 of his biography of Gauss: Among the axioms of geometry which do not depend on the parallel postulate are those which secure the free mobility of a ...
59 views

### Which kinds of academic revolutions has philosophy of science indentified so far and when?

Recently, I had an interdisciplinary discussion with some friends about Industry 4.0, internet of things,...which brought up the question, which kind of academic revolutions apart from industrial ...
82 views

### Why was the 'differential entropy' from information theory so named?

The entropy of a distribution $p$ on a discrete set $\mathcal{X}$ is defined as $$H(p) = -\sum_{x \in \mathcal{X}} p_x \log p_x.$$ Shannon in his classic paper [1] defines the analogue for continuous ...
158 views

### How long has the order of priority of arithmetical operations been widely taught in high schools?

Browsing Facebook, I often come across posts like this, to test peoples' understanding of order of operations. This inevitably prompts a deluge of answers that either misunderstand the concept or ...
49 views

### Where to find some early discussions of the Equinox(es)?

Said quickly, solstices are rather perceptible while the equinox is a mental construction. Archeoastronomical evidence shows that neolithic people already had knowledge about the solsticial points on ...
108 views

### Is Newton going to be the new Aristotle? [closed]

As general relativity and quantum mechanics become more accessible, is Newton going to become the new Aristotle, as the example of being wrong and misleading humanity for centuries? (as opposed to the ...
172 views

### History of various definitions of topology

I have been reading Point Set Topology for a while, and turns out that there are various possible ways to define a topology. Most popular one is using open set axioms. Another one is using closure ...
I know the story that Cole found the factoring of the big number $2^{67}-1$. Is there any other remarkable achievement of hand calculation?
A point is that of which there is no part. And a line is a length without breadth.$^1$ If above definition on point, expresses on point as to be indivisible length, as seems to be expressed in ...