Questions tagged [debunking]
For questions about finding the truth in claims that give good reason to be skeptical.
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Attributed quote to Nikola Tesla
In many serious engineering and scientific publications including IEEE publications, we see a quote attributed to Nikola Tesla which goes like this
If you want to find the secrets of the universe, ...
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What is the evidence for the existence of Geber?
In an unrelated question, some users started arguing about the existence of Geber (Jabir ibn Hayyan - جابر بن حيّان) from 806−816 AD and pseudo-Geber (probably from 13th-14th century). This ...
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Is it true that Empress Elisabeth of Austria did math?
I have encountered a user on Math Stack Exchange with writing in his bio that Empress Elisabeth of Austria ("Sisi") did some math and she was famous for an unsolvable integral:
$$\int_{0}^{1}...
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Are there any extant letters backing up the famous anecdote about Edmund Landau and Fermat's Last Theorem?
I recall reading in several sources the story about the letter "template" with which Edmund Landau used to answer individuals that sent him their "proofs" of Fermat's Last Theorem.....
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Source of a quote typically attributed to Proclus Lycaeus
The quote in question goes something like this:
This, therefore, is mathematics: she reminds you of the invisible form of the soul; she gives life to her own discoveries; she awakens the mind and ...
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Was Rayleigh the first to derive the drag equation?
I was reading about The Drag Equation:
$$ F_D = \frac{1}{2} \rho v^2 C_D A $$
where:
$ F_D $ is the drag force
$ \rho $ is the mass density of the fluid
$ v $ is the flow velocity relative to the ...
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What exactly was the Rutherford model of the atom?
I was recently doing research on the "Rutherford model" of the atom. I found that there seem to be three different accounts of Ernest Rutherford's theory circulating online:
Electrons move ...
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What mathematical problems did the Sicilians need Arab help with in 1229? Did the Arabs solve these problems?
An incident in the negotations of the Sixth Crusade is described as Frederick II asking help from Arab scholars with some mathematical problems:
... and the sultan graciously allowed Frederick to ...
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Do you know about this anecdote or its source where the mother reads out the letter to Gauss and made him Gauss, the mathematician?
I remember my brother telling me an anecdote about Carl F. Gauss three-four years ago, I want to know if anybody here also know about it, or can provide the source of it. The anecdote goes like this
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Did Renaissance mathematicians once consider themselves inferior to the great ancient mathematicians?
In the book What do you care what other people think?, Feynman talks about how in the 16th century Niccolo Tartaglia discovered a solution to cubic equations. He says while this was not a major ...
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Where did the false "equal transit-time" explanation of lift originate from?
It's supposedly a "widely circulated" false claim that wings generate lift because of their asymmetric shape, forcing air above to travel faster so that they meet up on the trailing edge at the same ...
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What is the origin of the Chinese Stick Multiplication method?
A while back I came across an interesting method to do multiplication. I don't know what it's called and am interested in when (and who) developed this method.
I don't know if it's a mathematical ...
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Looking for a specific story about young Stephen Hawking
There was a specific account of Stephen Hawking by one of his contemporaries in which Hawking was in his late undergrad or early postgrad.
As I remember, there was a small class of physics students (...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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Did Einstein say "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them"?
According to various sources on the Web, Albert Einstein is likely to have said or written one of the following:
Probleme kann man niemals mit derselben Denkweise lösen, durch die sie entstanden ...
user7921
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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 ...
user459
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What was Pauling's claim about vitamin C?
As I understand it after winning two (un-shared) Nobel prizes Linus Pauling began work which eventually had him recommending large amounts of vitamin C to all and sundry.
When another scientist was ...
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Poincaré and the baker: was the anecdote true?
There is a story featuring Henri Poincaré and an unscrupuolous baker. Every day Poincaré bought a piece of bread which should have weighted 1 kg. After an year, the mathematician brought the baker to ...
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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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A question on Gauss' "Vicimus GEGAN"
The 43rd entry(Oct. 1796) of Gauss' mathematical diary "Vicimus GEGAN" remained a mystery for a long time. K. R. Biermann found evidence that GEGAN is related the famous arithmetic-geometric mean(AGM) ...
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Is Spivak right in what he says about Galileo?
On chapter 9 of M. Spivak's book on calculus there is an exercise in which Spivak asks the reader to prove that Galileo "got his facts wrong". More specifically, Spivak asks one to to show if a body ...
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Has Chinese Remainder Theorem ever been used by Chinese military?
The Chinese Remainder Theorem says, in rough terms, that if you know the remainders of an integer $n$ modulo $m_1,m_2,\dots,m_r$, you also know $n$ modulo $\mathrm{lcm}(m_1,m_2,\dots,m_r)$.
In the ...
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Story of Grothendieck's Prime Number
There is a story about Alexander Grothendieck and the "Grothendieck Prime" 57, which goes roughly as follows (cf. this wikipedia article):
In a mathematical conversation, someone suggested to ...
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Did Poincaré say that set theory is a disease?
This question has been discussed on several sites including MathOverflow but with not definite result. Presumely HSE is best suited.
Jeremy Gray denies that Poincare said, "Later generations will ...
user5699
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What did Millikan expect to find when he tried to disprove the photoelectric effect, but proved it instead?
We know that Millikan ended up proving Einstein's photoelectric equation instead of disproving it. Since he aimed at disproving it, what did he have in mind? In other words, what did he expect to see?
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Beware the Ides of March!
Apropos of the murder of Gaius Julius Caesar, the late V. I. Arnold told the following amusing story in pages 89-90 of his "Yesterday and Long Ago":
CAESAR AND GAULS: THE DEFENSE OF ROME FROM THE ...
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Did light bulb companies commission Planck to study black body radiation?
Background
When introducing Planck's switch to looking at black-body radiation, a number of sources -- like MinutePhysics, the Economist, random online encyclopaedias and even here on HSM.SE (plus ...
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Creation Science [closed]
Atheists claim Creation Science isn't really science while creationists claim it is. Historically, which is correct according to the scientific community and why do they say this? I hope this is not ...
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Who first proved the "Cantor-Heine theorem" on uniform continuity?
The theorem is that any continuous function on a compact is uniformly continuous.
It is called "Heine", and sometimes also "Heine-Cantor" theorem.
My question is: what is the contribution of Cantor ...
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Did Cauchy forget or lose mathematical papers aside from Abel's and Galois's?
Augustin-Louis Cauchy was a prolific writer, his writings range widely in mathematics and mathematical physics. As a professor at École Polytechnique he came in contact and reviewed Abel's and Galois' ...
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Did Newton find the trajectory of a body moving in uniform gravity under the quadratic resistance law (the ballistic problem)?
I'm very confused by contradicting accounts of a supposed solution by Newton to the problem of finding the trajectory of a projectile moving under uniform gravity against resistance that is ...
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How did Newton guess that the answer to the 3-dimensional "kissing problem" is 12?
I understand almost nothing about sphere packings and kissing numbers, but I am very curious to learn about the Newton - Gregory discussion of the problem. In particular, I wonder if Newton's guess ...
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Did Kronecker attribute immutable origin to the integers?
The familiar quote is often incorrectly attributed to Kronecker directly. Actually a colleague of his named Weber claimed after Kronecker's death that Kronecker said this. I have doubts about this ...
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Who gets credit for the real numbers?
If Simon Stevin already pioneered the unending decimal representation for every number (rational, surd, etc.) at the end of the 16th century, why do Cantor and Dedekind (who certainly gave a more ...
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Is the "questions that can’t be answered over answers that can’t be questioned" quote by Feynman authentic?
In a lot of places I find this quote from Feynman:
I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.
However, I cannot find any source of where it ...
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Did Leibniz use infinite numbers?
Arthur's recent article
Arthur, Richard T. W.
Leibniz's actual infinite in relation to his analysis of matter. G. W. Leibniz, interrelations between mathematics and philosophy, 137–156,
Archimedes,...
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What is the original source for Abel's quote about Gauss:"He is like the fox, who effaces his tracks in the sand with his tail"?
According to the editor of the German version of Ian Stewart's "The Problems of Mathematics", on page 226 of the biography of Gauß authored by Erich Worbs (C. F. Gauß: Ein Lebensbild. Koehler & ...
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What is the original source for Gelfand's problem on leading digits of the powers of 2?
The question of the distribution of the leading digits of the sequence $2^n$ is called Gelfand's problem or Gelfand's question. Is there any source that indicates Gelfand's own work on this, or the ...
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On Einstein's proof of the so-called Pythagorean theorem
Part I
In E. Maor's book [2, p. 117] we read that, somewhere in his Autobiographical Notes, Einstein wrote this:
An uncle told me about the Pythagorean theorem before the holy geometry booklet had ...
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Maclaurin and the Lituus spiral
Lots of books and web sites claim that the lituus was first defined by Roger Cotes (correct) but named by Maclaurin in his "Harmonia mensurarum" in 1722. I believe the latter is incorrect on two ...
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How was the Möbius strip discovered?
Britannica is terse:"Möbius discovered this surface in 1858. The German mathematician Johann Benedict Listing had discovered it a few months earlier, but he did not publish his discovery until 1861". ...
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Who discovered Napoleon's theorem?
I read about Napoleon's Theorem in geometry. Was this the same Napoleon as the great warrior? Was he a mathematician too?
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Why is the Sophie Germain Identity called thus?
Several authors (z.B.: Arthur Engel in his Problem-Solving Strategies, Alexander Bogomolny in this entry of the Cut the Knot website) refer to the following (straightforward) consequence of the ...
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Is Millikan's famous oil drop experiment a fraud?
I read in my mechanics textbook written by Goodstein that Robert Millikan cherry-picked his data in his famous oil drop experiment, and now I'm left wondering about the scientific value of his results....
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Did Gauss say "there have been but three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton and Eisenstein"?
In Wikipedia I found this claim by E.T. Bell in his Men of Mathematics. However in the next paragraph it says that "it is doubtful that Gauss put Eisenstein in the same league as Newton", which makes ...
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Did Kontsevich start a lecture with "one I will not define, the other nobody knows how to define, and we will be proving that they are equivalent"?
The story was circulating in early 2000s, so presumably it happened in 1990s. Kontsevich, it goes, opened a lecture course on mirror symmetry with:"This course is about two categories. One I will not ...
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What is the origin of the cut and weigh method of integration, is it Galileo's?
I recently heard a story of a clever method of approximating an integral which, instead of using numerical techniques, relied on physically drawing out the graph of a function, cutting it out, and ...
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Did Galileo bet money on the ship experiment?
Galileo's writings describe two experiments involving ships. These are summarized in the Wikipedia article Galileo's ship. (A lot of the text in the article is mine, and if there are things I'm ...
user466
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Gauss accused of witchcraft: apocryphal?
I recall reading years ago in a linear algebra book that Gauss was accused of witchcraft for his (re)discovery of what we now call the row reduction algorithm for solving linear equations. Has anyone ...
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