Questions tagged [biographical-details]
For questions about the details of a particular scientist's life.
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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 ...
5
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3answers
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)
...
4
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1answer
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 ...
7
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1answer
178 views
Did Cambridge change their BSc policy for Ramanujan?
I found this quote at Quora:
In March 1916 Ramanujan graduated from Cambridge with a Bachelor of Science by Research (This degree was later renamed as Ph.D. from 1920) for his work on Highly ...
7
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1answer
182 views
Is the anecdote about Niels Bohr keeping a horseshoe on his door true?
I recently came to know of an anecdote about Niels Bohr that the philosopher Slavoj Zizek claims to have read in a biography of Bohr. He doesn't specify the author or the biography.
The anecdote ...
3
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1answer
80 views
Who associated the sharp, principal, diffuse, fundamental spectral terms with electron's momentum?
It is well documented that the notation for the electronic configuration (s,p,d,f) of atoms as used today originates from the words sharp, principal, diffuse, fundamental from alkali metal spectra (...
3
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1answer
64 views
Biographical informations on Igor Ado
Ado's Theorem is a very reelvant result in Lie theory (every finite-dimensional Lie algebra is isomorphic to a matrix Lie algebra).
I've been, however, unable to find anything more than very basics ...
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1answer
99 views
Explanation of Gauss's late fragments dealing with “the conformal image of the ellipse”
My question refers to some not very well known fragments of Gauss that treat the problem of finding a conformal mapping (angle-preserving mapping) in the complex plane from the interior of the ellipse ...
2
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1answer
165 views
Meaning of passages by Gauss on the “convergence of expansions (in infinite series) of the (elliptical) equation of the center”?
Yesterday I took my time to look again into Schlesinger's essay on Gauss's contributions to analysis, and I found something new I didn't know about (so it caught my eye) in the last subsection of the ...
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2answers
290 views
Has anything survived of the work of alleged science journalist and medical doctor 'Adolph Klein', allegedly born 1829 in Merseburg?
The Jewish Encyclopedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Encyclopedia) contains a sizeable entry on one 'Adolph Klein', allegedly born on 1829-05-29 in ther German city of Halle (Saale).
...
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0answers
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Is there any historical mention of Richard Feynman being aware of multiverse theories of cosmology?
The reason I ask is because he talks about the fine structure constant in one of his undergraduate lectures.
The reference to its mystery is analogous to all the special constants of nature such as ...
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0answers
87 views
Several questions about Gauss's mathematical conception of braids
I'm trying to figure out several things about Gauss's thoughts concerning a certain four-strand braid. The reference my questions are based on is mainly Moritz Epple's excellent article "orbits of ...
3
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1answer
104 views
Is there anything written by Newton's roommate Wilkins about him?
I've read that John Wilkins was Newton's room-mate and they lived together for 20 years. Is there anything about Newton written by Wilkins?
By the way, there is nothing easily found on google.
3
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0answers
63 views
A portrait of Bombelli
Is there any known portrait of Rafael Bombelli? I don't think so, but if you visit his MacTutor biography, you will see there this picture:
It is clear to me that this cannot possibly be a picture of ...
4
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0answers
149 views
How old might Emmy Noether be in this picture?
I have not found bibliographic data to show what age Noether was in this picture:
And I cannot estimate well either by her clothes or her face.
Can anyone here help me?
In the past I have known ...
4
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2answers
143 views
What mathematical techniques Gauss used in order to tessellate the unit disk?
This question is a continuation of my previously posted question: Was Gauss aware of the non-euclidean implications of his work on moduler forms?, and is based on the information given in John ...
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1answer
86 views
What is the modern interpretation of Gauss's “Summatorische Function”?
In Buhler's biography of Gauss (Gauss: A Biographical Study), at the chapter on modular forms and hypergeometric series, he mentions a function that Gauss called "Summatorische Function", which he ...
5
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2answers
343 views
What are the modern connections of the Pentagramma Mirificum studied by Gauss?
In the last years, i read a lot about a mathematical object that was discovered by John Napier in 1620 and explored much more deeply by Gauss, who called this "Pentagramma Mirificum" (latin for "the ...
3
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1answer
305 views
Gauss's anticipation of quaternions and their relation to congruences
Recently i read the article "Hamilton, Rodrigues, Gauss, Quaternions and Rotations: A Historical Reassessment", which can be found freely on the internet. This article is by far the most comprehensive ...
3
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0answers
75 views
Question about Gauss's contributions to the theory of electric circuits
This question is a continuation of my previously-posted question: Several questions about Gauss's contributions to electromagnetism. I wrote it after user vonbrand asked me to split my original ...
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0answers
73 views
Query 31 in Newton's opticks and the second law of thermodynamics
Query 31 in Newton's opticks contains the following words: "But by reason of the Tenacity of Fluids, and Attrition of their Parts, and the Weakness of Elasticity in Solids, Motion is much more apt to ...
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1answer
194 views
Do these trigonometric identities belong to Antonio Cagnoli?
I'm new to this stack community, please bear with me as I try to explain my question properly. Recently I came across with these trigonometric identities (where $ \omega + \phi + \psi = 180^\circ $):
...
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0answers
110 views
Several questions about Gauss's contributions to electromagnetism
First of all, i appologize if i'm asking too many questions about Gauss (and some will also say "not very interesting questions"); i know i might appear ridiculus - but i really think it's an ...
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0answers
161 views
How did Gauss's electrodynamics law preempt the later developement of retarded potentials theory in physics?
My question refers to a fragment on electrodynamics written by Gauss at around 1835. In this short note (see Gauss's werke, volume V, p. 616-617) Gauss wrote down a fundamental equation which ...
4
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0answers
109 views
What was Gauss's theoretical work related to his invention of the “Double-Gauss lens”?
Gauss's contributions (Dioptriche Untersuchungen, 1840) to the "classical" optical theory (Gaussian optics, i.e calculations made under the paraxial approximation) are well known, but long before he ...
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1answer
210 views
What were 12 year old Pitts' objections to Principia Mathematica?
In Wikipedia on the page dedicated to Walter Pitts (accesses today), it is written that,
He is widely remembered to have spent three days in a library, at the age of 12, reading Principia ...
5
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1answer
145 views
Was Paul Cohen a student or assistant of Gödel?
In The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, a biography about Paul Erdős, by Paul Hoffman, the author claims that Paul Cohen was "Gödel's former assistant" (p 225). However, I can't find any other sources ...
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0answers
51 views
What were Gauss's results on the attraction of homogenous ellipsoids in his paper from 1813?
I'm very curius to learn of the solution to the problem of the gravitational attraction of triaxial ellipsoid, both in his internal and external parts. From what i read, i understood that the solution ...
1
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1answer
59 views
Summary of Gauss's work on geodesic lines on ellipsoid
The solution to the problem of geodesic lines on a biaxial ellipsoid (when two of the axes are equal) is not very hard and can be solved by mathematical tools that existed prior to Gauss - i.e via ...
7
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1answer
332 views
How did Wittgenstein fulfill eligibility requirements for a PhD in philosophy without having a Bachelor's degree in philosophy?
The Wikipedia article about Wittgenstein says:
In Norway it was clear that Moore was expected to act as Wittgenstein's secretary, taking down his notes, with Wittgenstein falling into a rage when ...
11
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4answers
364 views
In a popular anecdote, who took 20 minutes to decide that a thing was obvious?
The joke is found on this comment chain on Reddit. One user told the joke:
The version I heard is that Pauli was lecturing, and he said "this is obvious". A student raises his hand and says "sorry ...
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3answers
5k views
Is this Einstein rejection letter fake?
So I found this on the internet the other day-
Is this fake?
Are there any ways to prove that it's fake?
Does there, if any, exist any real copy of such a rejection letter?(Was Einstein ever ...
4
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1answer
147 views
Pauli's first paper about the spin
Wikipedia states, that the spin degree of freedom was first formulated by Pauli in 1924:
In 1924 Wolfgang Pauli introduced what he called a "two-valued quantum degree of freedom" associated with ...
4
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1answer
169 views
Who influenced Gauss in his abstract approach to mathematics?
I have studied that Gauss was one of the firsts mathematicians to defend this idea, about the Abstract Math and the conception of number, claiming that "What is calculated (in the sense of things ...
7
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2answers
212 views
What did Fermat do as a lawyer?
Fermat is easily one of the best known mathematicians of all time. We all know about Fermat's Last Theorem, Fermat's Little Theorem, his quadrature rule, his invention of probability theory, etc. ...
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0answers
76 views
Laplace's characterization of Gauss as “a super-terrestrial spirit in a human body”
The following words concerning Carl Friedrich Gauss are attributed to Laplace in an article from the Mathematics magazine by Teets and Whitehead (The discovery of Ceres: how Gauss became famous, first ...
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177 views
Did Gauss anticipate Kirchhoff's diffraction formulation in 1836?
Clemens Schaefer says, in his treatise "Über Gauss' physikalische Arbeiten", that for a very short time in the years 1835/1836 Gauss showed interest in the new diffraction experiments of Fresnel and ...
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1answer
97 views
Why is there some doubt whether or not Gauss saw the pseudosphere as the embodiment of hyperbolic geometry?
I read a lot of historical articles that doubt the possibility that Gauss saw in the pseudosphere the realization of hyperbolic geometry; that geodetic triangles on the pseudosphere obey the same ...
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0answers
90 views
Nature of Fermat's friend Lalouvère's activities as censor?
Fermat had a friend at Toulouse named Lalouvère. Lalouvère was censor, jesuit, and mathematician (in alphabetical order).
Antonella Romano writes on page 512 of her book La Contre-Réforme ...
3
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3answers
393 views
How did Gauss overcome the problem of curvature of sunlight rays when he developed his heliotrope?
My question refers to Gauss's heliotrope - an optical device for projecting sunlight to a distance by a reflecting mirror, that was used in geodetic surveys in order to mark reference points. The ...
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2answers
71 views
Biographies comparing the personal and professional lives of various influential scientists/mathematicians?
There are many biographies that go into detail into the lives of a single, or maybe a couple of scientists.
I am wondering, is there a good book that does not focus on an individual, but explicitly ...
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0answers
48 views
How to derive from Gauss's result on the volume of orthoscheme tetrahedron the formulas of Lobachevsky and Bolay?
My question is a direct continuation of my already posted question Did Gauss's expression for the differential of the hyperbolic volume of the tetrahedron agree with later results?.
I simply didn'...
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2answers
410 views
Did Gauss's expression for the differential of the hyperbolic volume of the tetrahedron agree with later results?
My question is mainly about getting explanation to Gauss's third note (note III) in his writing "Zur Astralgeometrie", (see Cubierung der Tetraeder, pages 228-229), and about placing it in the right ...
3
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1answer
117 views
Who knows Frank Irvin?
In a German book by Helmut Kracke I found Frank Irvin mentioned. Irvin proved in 1916 the convergence of the harmonic series when all terms containing a 9 were omitted. I would like to include Irvin ...
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0answers
61 views
Why was F. W. Lanchester's first aeronautical paper rejected by the Physical Society?
Lanchester was arguably the first to somewhat accurately describe the physical mechanism for the generation of lift. In 1894, the Birmingham Natural History and Philosophical Society read his paper, ...
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2answers
334 views
Famous messy scientists
Which scientists were known to be messy?
I know of Albert Einstein:
And of Jean Piaget:
Are there other examples?
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0answers
113 views
When did William (Bill) Burke, who discovered the first actual bug, live and die?
Grace Hopper is frequently credited with finding the first actual bug. In fact, she just popularized the story of how William (Bill) Burke found the bug in the Mark II computer and documented it.
I'...
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0answers
103 views
F. Schoblik's announced ''ausführliche Darstellung": a lost wrong proof of the Four Color Theorem?
In (the AMS Chelsea Publishing version of) what is perhaps the first genuine textbook on graph theory ever, Dénes Kőnig on p. 28 gives the illustration
and the footnote
which when translated says
...
4
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2answers
252 views
What topological ideas did Gauss introduce to his student Möbius?
Recently I found a website with good historical information about the contributions of Gauss to Analysis situs (the old term for topology). The site is in German so I made a Google translate to ...
2
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1answer
128 views
Did Kepler influence Fermat?
On page 347 in his "Mathematical Thought, volume 1", Morris Kline writes:
"The work on the third class of problems, finding the maxima and minima of functions, may be said to begin with an ...
