Questions tagged [mathematicians]
For questions about those who did mathematics
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Who are the youngest mathematicians that published an original research article in a peer-reviewed journal?
There is a lot of interesting information about young mathematicians, but I cannot find any information about the youngest mathematician that published an original research article in a peer-reviewed ...
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What is Cardano trying to say in this passage of his Ars Magna Arithmeticæ?
It is well known that Cardano considered the problem of "dividing 10
into two parts the product of which is 40" in his Ars Magna. This problems leads to the complex solutions $5+ \sqrt{-15}$ ...
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How did Emmy Noether become interested in abstract algebra?
Emmy Noether was initially interested in invariant theory. But how did she become interested in abstract algebra? And why did she become particularly interested in ring and ideal theory?
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Source of a Poincaré quote: "Logic sometimes makes monsters..."
There's a quote by Poincare on the "new functions", such as continuous functions without derivatives, that were appearing during the second half of the 19th century. The fullest version I've ...
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John von Neumann's thinking process
I'm interested in John von Neumann these days. So I searched this file. And I read books The Man from the Future and John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game ...
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What does the 'W.H.' stand for in 'J.H.W.H. Conway' in Knuth's book Surreal Numbers?
In his book Surreal Numbers Donald Knuth refers to John Horton Conway as J.H.W.H. Conway. The J is for John and the H for Horton, but what about the W and the H? I have searched for Conway's middle ...
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Who invented bit permutations like shuffle, butterfly and bit-reversal?
This question is about a class of periodic permutations,that are produced by applying finite permutations to the binary digits of all integers.
In lack of a better name, they shall be called bit ...
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Did Euler know Ancient Greek?
In a previous question on this website: What was Euler's first language?,
Alexandre Eremenko wrote the following about Leonard Euler:
There is little doubt that he also learnt French in his ...
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Who was the first to use bijections?
I know that Bourbaki were the first who used the word 'bijection', but one-to one functions were for sure used before them. So do you aware of the earliest examples of one-to-one correspondences?
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Who was the first woman to complete the physics and mathematics program in Zürich?
According to descriptions of Mileva Marić, Einstein's first wife, she was the second woman to complete the mathematics and physics program at the Zürich Polytechnikum. However, nobody points out who ...
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Did Cardano predict the date of his death then commit suicide on that date?
Morris Kline (Mathematics in Western Culture, 1953):
It is said that he prognosticated his own death and committed suicide on the date predicted in order to maintain his reputation as an astrologer.
...
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Gábor Szegő burial location
Yesterday I saw Pólya's burial spot in Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto, CA. Actually, it was not a grave but an urn (which gives a new meaning to the term "Pólya's urn model"). ...
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Historical background with Weber and Kronecker's Jugendtraum
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/74073/the-first-complete-proof-of-the-kronecker-weber-theorem
I searched above link, and I was so interested about this post.
Today, I have a question about ...
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How did Grothendieck come in contact with Category theory?
Category theory was formalized around 1950s, and Grothendieck made his breakthrough papers about 10-20 years from that time. I wish to know, how was it possible the ideas of Category Theory were so ...
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Grothendieck's complete absorption in mathematical research
I have recently been interested in the history of French Mathematics especially in Grothendieck and his school. I have also been fascinated with Grothendieck's personality.
It is known that during ...
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Who is the artist who depicted Tartaglia?
I mentioned in a previous question that I'm writing a young adult novel that explores the discovery of complex numbers. I might want to include an illustration of Tartaglia. All of the illustrations ...
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Who was Hans J. Maehly?
During some recent work on the computation of the inverse Langevin function I ran into trouble trying to generate a highly-accurate minimax rational approximation with a variant of the Remez algorithm,...
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Where did Lagrange write his technique of resolvents for solving polynomials?
From Andrew Ellinor & Satyajit Mohanty's article on a technique for solving cubics:
Using Lagrange's resolvents, to solve the cubic, one has to first solve a quadratic. Given the general cubic, $$...
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Have all of Euler's works been translated?
I am interested in reading Euler's works.
The Euler Archive contains some translated works but not all of them. I am just checking here to see if anyone know a complete translation of all of Euler's ...
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Examples of mathematicians who applied to patent their work
MIT's RSA encryption was granted a patent although it was not enforced for non-commercial applications. Similarly for Stanford's PGP encryption algorithm. However, these are institutions rather than ...
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Did Skolem have any siblings?
The biographies of Thoralf Skolem focus on his scientific achievements. I could not find any data regarding whether he was an only child or had siblings.
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Who discovered intrinsic curvature first?
Historically, Gauss measured it by an old method called after his name today: The Gauss map.
This maps the normal vector at each point of a surface curve to the unit sphere. Then he measured the angle ...
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How did Isaac Newton write the integral symbol?
Isaac Newton is known as the discoverer of the FTC (Fundamental Theorem of Calculus), so maybe he wrote the integral symbol and derivative symbol. I know he wrote the derivative symbol as $\dot y$ but ...
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The Originator of Cobweb Diagrams
A cobweb diagram is a visualization tool that allows one to qualitatively study the iterates of a self-map of the real line based on the graph of the function; here is an example:
(Here the map is ...
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Is there a theorem proof whose accuracy is doubted because it is short?
Is there a theorem proof whose accuracy is doubted because it is short?
He told me while chatting with a friend of mine. It's about a mathematician who proves a difficult theorem very briefly and ...
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Leonhard Euler's Mathematical Proof of God
There is a famous legend inspired by Euler's arguments with secular philosophers over religion, which is set during Euler's second stint at the St. Petersburg Academy. The French philosopher Denis ...
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Biographical details on Otto Zoll
Zoll's surfaces are a special kind of surfaces generalizing the spheres, in that all of their geodesics are closed and of the same length.
I've tried to gather some biographical details on Otto Zoll ...
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What does this quote by Paul Halmos mean?
I came across the following quote by the famous mathematician Paul Halmos:
A clever graduate student could teach Fourier something new, but surely no one claims that he could teach Archimedes to ...
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What are the names of parents of Adrien-Marie Legendre, and their dates of birth and death?
What are the full names and dates of birth and of death of the parents of Adrien-Marie Legendre? I couldn't find this information anywhere online. Not even their names. Thank you.
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Why was Cauchy studying Schur polynomials and related topics?
Let $\lambda_1 \geq \lambda_2 \geq \cdots \geq \lambda_n$ be nonnegative integers. The Schur polynomial $s_{\lambda}(x_1, \ldots, x_n)$ can be defined as the ratio
$$s_{\lambda}(x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_n) ...
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Where is Alfred Tarski buried?
Where is Alfred Tarski buried?
He was a famous Polish mathematician. He died in 1983 in Berkeley, California, USA, according to Wikipedia. I tried a search on Find a Grave, but there is no entry for ...
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Kolmogorov on frequentists versus Bayesians
What was Kolmogorov's attitude regarding the frequentist versus Bayesian statistics controversies? Did he ever write or speak about his own views on Fisher or de Finetti, Jeffreys, etc.? Or were those ...
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How did 'N. Bourbaki' address a conference?
As I understand it, 'N. Bourbaki' was the pseudonym of a collective of French mathematicians. How, then, did 'it' give a conference talk1 in Columbus, Ohio in 1948?
1 N. Bourbaki, Foundations of ...
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Definition and Name Change of the Oscillation Function
I have two related questions:
Who first defined the oscillation function (perhaps under a different name)?
When did the switch from the phrase "saltus function"(*) to "oscillation ...
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Did John von Neumann solve any unsolved problem in mathematics?
I have searched and examined legendary stories of the problem-solving skills of von Neumann in mathematics.
With George Polya
With Dantzig
Maybe there are other stories showing that he is a great ...
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Who is/was R. Alter, who reported 1375298099 can be expressed as the sum of 3 fifth powers in 2 different ways?
David Wells, in his entertaining but non-scholarly Curious and Interesting Numbers (1986, 2 ed. 1997) reports that the positive integer $1 \, 375 \, 298 \, 099$ can be expressed as the sum of $3$ ...
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Who was A.M. Nesbitt, the eponym of Nesbitts Inequality?
Nesbitt's Inequality can be found all over the internet:
$$\frac{a}{b+c}+\frac{b}{a+c}+\frac{c}{a+b}\geq\frac{3}{2}$$
This appears to have been first published in 1902 in Education Times, by A.M. ...
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Who was Antoine Appert, the eponym of the Appert Topology and Appert Space?
Antoine Appert is mentioned in the bibliography of Steen & Seebach's Counterexamples in Topology, but miscited as "Q. Appert". Haven't a clue what Q would stand for so assuming this is a ...
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Who were the attendees to the SGA3 seminar?
Here is a photograph of the audience of SGA3 (as noted by Mateo Carmona).
Other photographs may be viewed from the homepage: https://agrothendieck.github.io/
Grothendieck is facing the audience. I ...
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Are there any famous female mathematicians who have written in Latin?
I am writing a book on modern mathematics and the Latin language. My main examples are Newton, Euler, Gauss, etc. and some others, but all men.
Is there a woman who has written important mathematics ...
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Who was Richard Thompson?
There is family of famous groups with unusual group-theoretic properties due to a mathematician called Richard Thompson that are widely studied in group theory. The papers on these groups and the ...
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Poincaré's quote: "I thought a lot about them"
I have a vague memory of reading once that somebody (maybe a journalist) asked Poincaré how had he been capable of solving all those fantastically difficult problems that he had solved. The answer was ...
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Is there a known photograph of Walter Arnoldi?
A famous mathematician known for the algorithm he developed in 1950s named after him (Arnoldi Iteration Algorithm).
For my research presentation I am including photographs of pioneers of numerical ...
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Who came up with the theory of Krylov Subspaces?
The well celebrated field of numerical linear algebra is heavily based on Krylov subspace methods. A quick google search on Krylov himself returned the following results:
Nikolay Krylov (1941-) [...
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Request: Readers to Check Accuracy of the History in my Young Adult Math Story
I'm writing a young adult math story, Althea and the Mystery of the Imaginary Numbers.
Her mom tells her about Scipione del Ferro, Antonio Fior, Tartaglia, Cardano, and Ferrari. And they do some math ...
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How many languages does Paul Erdős have publications in?
I was flicking through these slides by Prof. Richard Brent, wherein we have:
Erdős (1955, in Hebrew) gave an upper bound M(n) = o(n2) as n → ∞. After some encouragement by Linnik and Vinogradov, he ...
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Source of a Quote by M. Stone on Poincaré and Bourbaki
The quote in question is the following:
For Bourbaki, Poincaré was the devil incarnate. For students of chaos and fractals, Poincaré is of course God on Earth.
The common reference for this quote ...
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Reference for "A manifold is a topological space which satisfies a long series of axioms."
In On teaching mathematics, Vladimir Igorevich Arnold states
"What is a smooth manifold? In a recent American book I read that Poincaré was not acquainted with this (introduced by himself) notion ...
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Cantor's later life
I saw this on Wikipedia:
In June 1917, he entered a sanatorium for the last time and continually wrote to his wife asking to be allowed to go home. Georg Cantor had a fatal heart attack on January 6, ...
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First example of regularization
Background:
I like to think of L'Hospital as one of the earliest authors of least-squares regression.
L'Hospital, G. (1696). L'analyse des infiniment petits pour l'intelligence des lignes
courbes.
I'm ...
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