Questions tagged [mathematicians]
For questions about those who did mathematics
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What contributions to mathematics did Napoleon make?
I have watched a video about Napoleon's theorem — maybe it was contributed by Napoleon, maybe not. I also know that Laplace himself said Napoleon was good at mathematics. However, did Napoleon make ...
user15948
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Kronecker vs Cantor — who won?
Now set theory is taught even to kids and it is the foundation of mathematics. Can we say that Cantor won?
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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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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 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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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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Evaluating the Mehrtens hypothesis concerning Felix Klein
Historian H. Mehrtens hypothesized an opposition between moderns and countermoderns in early 20th century mathematics, with the former led by Hilbert and the latter by Klein.
Hilbert's lecture at the ...
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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 ...
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Were ratios of incommensurable magnitudes interpreted as irrational numbers prior to Fibonacci?
I have read that a lost book by Fibonacci (a commentary on Book X of Euclid's Elements) gives a numerical treatment of incommensurable magnitudes.
Given that Fibonacci grew up in North Africa and ...
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What actions and communications did Fibonacci undergo to introduce the Hindu-Arabic Number System to Europe?
Fibonacci is credited with the introduction of Arabic arithmetic to Europe. Did he tried hard to share this knowledge with other mathematicians? With whom? How did they react?
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Substantiating claimed Fourier quote about “an arbitrarily capricious graph”
The following quote (in English) is fairly widely attributed to Fourier, but I can't substantiate it.
An arbitrary function, continuous or with discontinuities, defined in a finite interval by an ...
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Source of cartoon lampooning Felix Klein
There is an interesting cartoon in the book
Lillian Hoddeson, Ernst Braun, Jurgen Teichmann, Spencer Weart (Eds.) Out of the Crystal Maze: Chapters from The History of Solid State Physics. Oxford ...
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Who is John B. Walsh?
Stochastic Partial Differential Equations (SPDEs) have received much attention in recent years, culminating in the fields medal of Martin Hairer.
A rigorous mathematical starting point for the studies ...
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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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What were Riemann's "semi-physical" methods?
In John Von Neumann's The Mathematician one can read that
[$\dots$] even after the reign of rigour was essentially re-established with Cauchy, a very peculiar relapse into semi-physical methods took ...
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Why was Kronecker dissatisfied with Cantor's submitted paper?
It is said here that
In 1874 Cantor published an article in Crelle's Journal which marks the birth of set theory. A follow-up paper was submitted by Cantor to Crelle's Journal in 1878 but already set ...
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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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Where can I learn more about lesser known mathematicians?
I'm reaching the point in my mathematical career that the names aren't so well known. Everybody knows that Euler was great and Gauss was even better, and it's not hard to learn that if Riemann died ...
user2942
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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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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 ...
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Can we fairly assess Ada Lovelace's talent for mathematics?
Dorothy Stein, a biographer of Ada Lovelace, was pretty blunt in her assessment: Lovelace was a mediocre mathematician, for example see here.
I wonder if she's fair to her. The fact that Lovelace ...
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History of infinite series
When was $\sum$ introduced as the notation for a sum and who was the first person to solve a infinite sum other than 0+0+0+...?
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What did Lagrange do with his quantity (the Lagrangian in classical mechanics)?
When I was learning classical mechanics, I was quite baffled by the Hamilton's principle, since it involves a quantity named after Lagrange. So, it seems that the principle was not discovered by ...
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Who, between Cayley and Hamilton, first worked on the theorem that bears their name?
I know that Frobenius is the one who proved the Cayley-Hamilton theorem in all its generality. However, between Cayley and Hamilton, who did first work on the subject?
In English: Cayley–Hamilton ...
user16484
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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 ...
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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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What are Philolaos' “even-odd” numbers?
Number, indeed, has two proper kinds (ιδια ειδη), odd and even, and a
third mixed together from both, the even-odd(αρτιοπέριττον). Of each
of the two kinds there are many shapes, of which each ...
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Who coined kernel in mathematics?
I'm convinced that there is no such a mathematician whose name is "kernel". The wiki article about kernel doesn't include history in its content.
So I wonder, who is the first mathematician to use ...
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For many years, were Emmy Noether and Helene Braun the only female mathematicians to obtain habilitation at Göttingen University?
Emmy Noether was the first woman in Germany to obtain habilitation in 1919. But I remember to have heard in the debate concerning the situation of women in academic mathematics that took place on the ...
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Non-standard model of arithmetic and Gödel's theorem
I've read Skolem's paper on his non-standard models of the arithmetic ("Über die Nicht-charakterisierbarkeit der Zahlenreihe mittels endlich oder abzählbar unendlich vieler Aussagen mit ...
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Skorokhod's contribution to probability theory
I always thought of Skorokhod associated with the topology for convergence in the space of càdlàg (right continuous with left limits) functions in probability.
But it seems that he made several other ...
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Why are there relatively many Eastern European (specifically Hungarian) graph theorists?
I noticed that a large number of theories within graph theory are from Eastern European graph theorists, specifically Hungarian graph theorists. What is the relation between Eastern Europe (...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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Is there any historical evidence of this quote E.T. Bell attributed to C.G.J. Jacobi?
I read Men of Mathematics by E.T. Bell long ago, and this quote he attributed to Jacobi stuck with me:
Certainly I have sometimes endangered my health from overwork, but what of it? Only cabbages ...
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What was Littlewood's quip about Hardy and plagiarism?
I'm searching for a quote by Littlewood about Hardy not giving proper credit. The story (as I remember it) is that Littlewood claimed uncredited authorship of something Hardy wrote, Hardy claimed it ...
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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 ...
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Who gave you infinitesimal epsilon?
As someone reputed among certain historians to have given you the epsilon Cauchy startled me by using $\varepsilon$ to denote an infinitely small number in his 1826 text on differential geometry; see ...
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Why isn't Aryabhata more famous than Pythagoras?
You saw the question right. Why isn't it so? Aryabhata had done more things than him. Is it because of the 400 or 500 years of difference between their existence? Pythagoras is famous most for his ...
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Reflections in the 18th century
It is well known that the theory of reflections was considerably developed during the 19th century with the development of group theory (e.g. Klein) and the theory of transformations. However, I'm ...
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How were irrational numbers accepted by mathematicians?
What was behind accepting the existence of irrational numbers historically? Especially numbers that are not constructible on the real number line, say for example $\sqrt[3]{2}$. Was it a (somewhat) ...
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Great scientists with chaotic private lives
In the arena of art, it is not uncommon to find great writers, composers or painters who suffer from chaotic personal lives (e.g., lifelong alcoholism, addiction to prostitutes, stormy marriages and ...
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Time for big results to become widely recognized in the scientific community
What are some examples of big results in mathematics and or physics that took a long time to be considered groundbreaking? What was the length of time from the original publication to the recognition?
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Source of Laurent Schwartz's quote about lobster and math
On the Wikipedia page about Laurent Schwartz, one can find the following quote:
What are mathematics helpful for ? Mathematics are helpful for physics. Physics helps us make fridges. Fridges are ...
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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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Lagrange buried in the Panthéon
Why is Lagrange buried in the Panthéon in Paris, but not any other French mathematicians or theoretical physicists? I would understand if they were not represented at all, but it seems absurd to ...
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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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What book did Maria Gaetana Agnesi write which contained both differential and integral calculus?
Wikipedia says the following about Maria Gaetana Agnesi:
She is credited with writing the first book discussing both differential and integral calculus and was a member of the faculty at the ...
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What is the opinion of famous mathematicians about academic research compared to mathematical competitions and olympiads? [closed]
I wonder what the quotes from mathematicians are about their views on academic research vs. math competitions. I can't find much, but I have found one:
Math competitions are to research what spelling ...
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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 ...
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