Questions tagged [mathematicians]
For questions about those who do mathematics.
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Source of L’Hôpital’s 1696 Calculus textbook
A calculus textbook I’m using references a calculus book of L’Hôpital in which he illustrates his rule, which is taught in many calculus classes.
Does anyone have a source as a scanned PDF? I’d love ...
0
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0answers
54 views
Magic Squares at the beginning of 20th century
I am doing research on the Ottoman Engineer and Mathematician Aram Margossian (1853-?) (in Turkish sources Margosyan is also used) He published a book, De l’ordonnance des nombres dans les carrés ...
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2answers
4k views
What are some famous mathematicians that disappeared?
In physics there is this famous history facts about Ettore Majorana, brilliant student of Enrico Fermi that predicted the neutron and developed the idea of Majorana fermions, that suddenly disappeared....
10
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1answer
305 views
Does Arnold say that Hardy is responsible for Ramanujan's untimely death?
Mathematician Vladimir Arnold in his book Yesterday and Long Ago, Springer (2007) writes:
When I resided at Cambridge as a senior fellow of Trinity College,
Indian colleagues told me some details ...
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1answer
49 views
What monograph on celestial mechanics did Jürgen Moser coauthor the 2nd and considerably expanded English language edition of with Carl Ludwig Siegel?
Comments under the Space SE question How do orbits around Jacobi ellipsoids behave? include:
Periodic orbits around a rotating ellipsoid "This paper extends results obtained during the ...
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69 views
Does Anthony Bloch have a kinship with Felix Bloch?
I would like to know whether Anthony Bloch is a descendant of Felix Bloch or not. The Anthony Bloch's page on The Mathematics Genealogy Project only shows his advisory relationships, not kinships.
...
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96 views
XIX century Russian math prodigies who published in Crelle
I recall there being two Russian math prodigies who published a joint paper in the Crelle's journal at the age of 18 or so. I think they lived in the XIX century. What were their names?
I can't ...
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72 views
How did Fermat find tangent lines of Folium of Descartes?
The wikipedia article about Folium of Descartes says:
Descartes challenged Pierre de Fermat to find the tangent line to the
curve at an arbitrary point since Fermat had recently discovered a
method ...
0
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1answer
74 views
Was Fourier inspired by Ptolemy?
Ptolemy invented a system to describe the periodic motion of the planets by epicycles. Fourier did something similar for periodic motion in mechanics. Every such motion can be thought of as ...
4
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1answer
187 views
Lost memoir of Évariste Galois
According to the Wikipedia article on Évariste Galois
He submitted his memoir on equation theory several times, but it was
never published in his lifetime due to various events. Though his
first ...
2
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0answers
115 views
How did Hamilton conclude the quaternions had to be four dimensional?
I have seen many times before that Hamilton started off believing he would need a three-dimensional system over the reals in order to describe 3D rotations. He considered numbers of the form $a + bi + ...
2
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2answers
148 views
Why don't inventors clearly describe or expound their ideas?
Kindly see the embolded sentence below.
To write Cauchy’s definitions down precisely takes a bit more work. This
was especially true for Cauchy himself, who had not quite phrased the ideas in
...
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0answers
62 views
Who first proved that the existence of a Euclidean algorithm implies unique factorization?
In Simachew's "A Survey on Euclidean Number Fields", he said that Gauss used the existence of a Euclidean algorithm in Gaussian integers to prove that it has unique factorization. Also, he ...
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0answers
106 views
Is it true that Mathematicians have a short shelf-life / peak early?
I have always heard this claim that, out of all disciplines, Mathematicians have the shortest 'shelf-life'. More specifically, that they peak early in their twenties (i.e. present their most important ...
3
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1answer
272 views
Did Euler produce any Russian text?
According to Wikipedia, Euler (1707-1783) "mastered Russian and settled into life in Saint Petersburg" in 1727. Did he produce any text in Russian, either mathematical or personal?
On The ...
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0answers
75 views
Who coined the term: "Directed Graph"?
I found that the term "Digraph" was coined in 1955 by Frank Harary in "The number of linear, directed, rooted, and connected graphs", and that it was a term actually suggested by ...
0
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0answers
121 views
Origins of Stone duality
My question is a mix of mathematical and historical, if you consider my question will be better answered in the mathematics community, please tell me.
I want to know the historical roots of Stone's ...
6
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2answers
493 views
A branch of mathematics which refused to be rigorous?
I'm currently in a class on formal mathematics/formal logic/axiomatic set theory. Someone asked, "At the end of the day, as mathematicians, why do we care about rigor?" My professor gave an ...
3
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1answer
123 views
What was the influence of Gauss on the understanding of the importance of non-Euclidean geometry?
As is known, Gauss came to similar conclusions as Lobachevskii in the problem of fifth postulate, but I don't know whether Gauss had any impact to the contemporaries in that story. Can anybody ...
3
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1answer
103 views
Who was E. Busche?
Donald E. Knuth reports in his: TAOCP: Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms (3rd ed.) in $\S1.2.4$: Integer Functions and Elementary Number Theory: Exercise 38 that this result:
$$\sum_{0 \mathop \le k \...
4
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1answer
181 views
Who was Paul Gerwien?
The famed Wallace–Bolyai–Gerwien theorem has got its name from three mathematicians who proved it independently. More precisely speaking
Farkas Bolyai first formulated the question. Gerwien proved ...
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31 views
Who was the first person to prove the invariance of the Euler characteristic under triangulations?
Given a compact orientable surface $S$ and any triangulation where $F$ denotes the amount of triangles, $E$ denotes the amount of edges, and $V$ denotes the amount of vertices, we know that the Euler-...
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1answer
3k views
Is the story about Fermat's writing on a margin true?
Is there any evidence that Fermat wrote on the margin of a book "I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition that this margin is too narrow to contain." Everyone ...
0
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1answer
79 views
Independent and dependent variables
Im doing this presentation for school and we have to find out who exactly first used independent and dependent variables. I've searched everywhere but no answer was found its either John radford young ...
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0answers
26 views
Is Robert Earl MacKenzie (co-author of Introduction to Differential Manifolds) still alive?
I am making sure that my information on certain mathematicians is up to date and accurate. To this end I am looking at Robert Earl MacKenzie, who (according to my records) was born March 17, 1920. I ...
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1answer
78 views
Did John Greever or John Jay Greever write "Theory and Examples of Point Set Topology"?
I have a reference to "Theory and Examples of Point Set Topology" by J. Greever (1967: Brooks/Cole).
I searched for biographical information on J. Greever and I identified:
John Greever, b. ...
3
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0answers
137 views
How did Euler obtain this formula from a paper/work in 1748?
I am reading this book on trigonometric series, "Тригонометрические ряды от Эйлера до Лебега" (Trigonometric series from Euler to Lebesgue) , it is in Russian, and my Russian is abysmal. But ...
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2answers
93 views
Who is the John Thomas of "Thomas's Plank" and "Thomas's Corkscrew"?
Entries $93$ and $94$ in Steen and Seebach's "Counterexamples in Topology" are named "Thomas's Plank" and "Thomas's Corkscrew". These are apparently named for a certain &...
2
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1answer
137 views
What did Roger Apery mean by "Oh they grow in my garden"
Roger Apery, a French mathematician most remembered for proving that $\zeta(3)\in\mathbb{R}\setminus\mathbb{Q}$ (irrational) in $1979$. In this video posted by Numberphile: https://www.youtube.com/...
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1answer
2k views
Story of a student who solves an open problem
A number of years ago, I read a (non-fiction) story about a young mathematician whose professor wrote an open problem on the board and the student went ahead and wrote down a solution after a moment ...
2
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1answer
61 views
Heyting and Lugano
I read in Wikipedia that Arend Heyting, logician, died in Lugano while all the biographies focus on his career in Amsterdam and nearby.
Do we know if he lived in Lugano or not, and why died there?
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184 views
Who were the mathematicians who hated teaching in class or disliked teaching?
Who were the mathematicians who hated teaching in class or disliked teaching?
From this Article:
Gauss hated teaching, and believed some students robbed him of his time.
From this Article:
Perelman ...
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2answers
333 views
Why we got so many geniuses after 19th century? [closed]
Albert Einstein was a genius, Kurt Gödel was a genius, John Von Neumann was a genius (I hope that people over here will share the meaning of "genius" which I understand, for me I always find ...
4
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1answer
151 views
Who was Fleury? And what was his first name?
One of the algorithms for finding Eulerian paths and circuits in graphs that have them is due to Fleury. Lucas mentioned this in his 1892 recreational mathematics collection, referring to "M. ...
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1answer
112 views
Why theology plays a great role in becoming great mathematicians? [closed]
Why theology play a great role in becoming great mathematicians?
I have some confusion about theology with mathematics.
I read the biography of Euler and Bernhard Riemann.
Both were studying ...
0
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4answers
915 views
Who were some mathematicians who have a musical background?
Who were some mathematicians who have a musical background ?
I know one mathematician , I see his video on you tube .He is a tabla player + field medal winner.
His name is Manjul_Bhargava
My ...
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1answer
129 views
How did Gaussian and Eisenstein integers get their names?
I can separate this into two questions at some point if necessary, but it's possible that sources for the answer to one will provide the answer to the other at the same time.
I learned about ...
3
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1answer
135 views
Did Fourier use heated metal rings as experimental evidence to justify his mathematical discoveries?
In his answer to a previous question Alexandre Eremenko pointed out that Joseph Fourier in his book Analytic Theory of Heat gave all kinds of arguments in favor of the following mathematical ...
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1answer
57 views
An English translation of Simon Stevin's De Thiende
I enjoy reading manuscripts written by mathematicians of old, and I would love to read the famous De Thiende by Simon Steven. I've done some research online here and there, but I have not found any ...
5
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0answers
130 views
Photo of Wilhelm Ackermann
I am writing a text on the Theory of Computation. I am looking for a photo of the mathematician Wilhelm Ackermann. He is well-known in the field, was a student of one of the most famous ...
6
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1answer
283 views
Who is the Göbel who is the eponym of Göbel's Sequence?
Richard K. Guy refers to him as "F. Göbel" in his Unsolved Problems of Number Theory but that's as close as I can get.
For reference:
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/GoebelsSequence.html
4
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1answer
132 views
Mathematicians who often didn't use notebooks/devices to work?
Newton was known to keep manuscripts of his thoughts and workings on math/physics (and even more related to religion) which are kept in Cambridge I believe.
My question is, are there examples of the ...
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0answers
69 views
Are there any accounts of Charles Peirce's character,cognition and physical appearance?
I am interested in any historical account of the following attributes of Peirce:character,cognition and appearance.
5
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1answer
102 views
Was Charles Sanders Peirce aware of Charles Babbage's difference engine?
Is there any indication that Charles Peirce was aware of Babbage and his work on mechanical computing?
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23 views
Founders of undetermined forms [duplicate]
Who are the people actually 1st to mention about undetermined forms like 0^∞ or 0/0 or ∞/∞ etc .
In which books these forms are mentioned and if the people were not known specifically , mention the ...
4
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1answer
118 views
Was Lebesgue differentiation theorem the motivation for Vitali's, Riesz's and Hardy-Littlewood's results used to prove it?
I have been reading about the Lebesgue differentiation theorem from Terence Tao's book and came across a bunch of things. In his book, Tao uses the Vitali Covering lemma (finite), Hardy-Littlewood ...
3
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1answer
119 views
How to pronounce Jacobson [closed]
Nathan Jacobson was one of the leading algebraists in the last century. Several mathematical objects are named after him such as the Jacobson radical. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Jacobson ...
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1answer
3k views
Which mathematician traveled to and moved in with each collaborator?
I remember a video, perhaps a Numberphile episode where a mathematician was described who would simply move in to the home of a collaborator with which they were engaged to so that they could work ...
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1answer
90 views
What are the Peirce's axioms of arithmetic and how do they relate to the Peano axioms?
I will be glad if someone who has seen Peirce's paper could summarily describe here Peirce's axioms and describe their relation to Peano's.
3
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1answer
216 views
"Family tree" of mathematicians and their PhD advisors and students
Whilst looking at the Wikipedia pages for some well known mathematicians I was surprised at how many of them were advised by other recognisable mathematicians. In some cases I could back track 5 or ...
