# All Questions

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### Who first defined complex analytic spaces?

By a complex analytic space I mean what Wikipedia calls a “complex analytic variety” (complex analytic spaces need not be Hausdorff). I am trying to learn about the history of this notion. In H. ...
99 views

### Motivating several of Gauss's suggestions for prize problems in the years 1830, 1834

P. 220-221 of volume 12 of Gauss's werke contain a complete list of the prize problems which Gauss suggested to the Goettingen university in the years 1830, 1834, 1842 and 1849. Those prize problems ...
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4k views

### What are the most precise measurements in science?

In 1957, Littlewood wrote that these are measurements of time in astronomy. Astronomers operate with times intervals between astronomical events 1000 years apart with accuracy 1/1000 of a second. This ...
• 45.4k
3k views

### How did Ptolemy know that days were unequal lengths?

Apparently Ptolemy was aware of the fact that the duration of time from noon to noon varied by many seconds throughout the course of a year. In modern times this fluctuation in length of day leads to ...
• 593
68 views

### Who popularized the atom icon (atom whirl or planetary model)

There is a symbol or icon for an atom that is instantly recognizable and is associated with nuclear physics and with chemistry. A search for "nuclear atom symbol" (on 3/23/2023) shows what ...
72 views
+50

### Original description of point sources and point spread functions

I already asked this question in the Astronomy community, but there it was recommended to me to also try my luck here. I would like to know the original description of point sources and point spread ...
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32 views

### Did Napoleon aggressively industrialise after the Treaty of Amiens? [closed]

As far as I know, Britain and France were still spoiling for a fight; Britain having lost colonies and France invading Switzerland. If Napoleon knew this, did he encourage British or American ...
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1 vote
136 views

### Ancient Chinese method to calculating $\pi$

I'm trying to understand the following passage from Boyer's and Merzbach's History of Mathematics: The question I have is: how does the author derive that $w^2=2rv$?
277 views

### Who published the law of tangents first?

The Law of Tangents is a rather obscure trigonometric identity that is sometimes used in place of its better-known counterparts, the law of sines and law of cosines, to calculate angles or sides in a ...
32 views

### How did the intergovernmental panel on climate change get established and become the authority on the topic?

I am interested in both the science communication and the "politics" of how this happened. How did we go from "A consensus of evidence has started to emerge that man-made climate change ...
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1 vote
46 views

### Did Russell's paradox affect Peano's construction in the Formulario?

Russell's letter to Frege in 1902 was after the first edition of the Formulario Mathematico but before the fifth one (1908). So I wondered if the discovery of Russell's paradox had made Peano to edit ...
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3k views

### What is the origin of the rubber sheet analogy?

I am trying to track down the first use of the 'bowling ball on a rubber sheet' analogy to explain spacetime curvature in general relativity. I have found a lot of secondary sources that give ...
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204 views

### Did the ancient Romans know and use the catenary test when building arches and bridges?

I am trying to understand if ancient Romans understood and used the catenary test when building bridges. I cannot find anything online
84 views

### Cauchy integral formula [duplicate]

There is an integral Cauchy formula. It would be nice to know who exactly (for the first time) added Cauchy's name to a formula that Cauchy was not the author of. Who do you think it could be? But ...
1 vote
152 views

### New mathematics theory vs new mathematical theorem

On the Academia site, there is a recent question that asks about obtaining reviewers for a "new theory". I'm only an amateur mathematician, not a professional, and the question got me ...
• 135
97 views

### Historical origins of the idea that information cannot travel faster than light

Is there a good book or other reference that discusses the historical origins of the principle that not even information can travel faster than the speed of light? In my understanding the main reason ...
• 109
137 views

### Origin of Riemann-Stieltjes Integral

What need (if there was any) created Riemann-Stieltjes integral? What did Riemann-Stieltjes integral want to attain?
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188 views

### On early US patriotism to choose quark color charge labels

Sean Carroll has a video about gauge theory (2020) in his series about Greatest Ideas of the Universe, where he claims that early in the development of quantum chromodynamics, some physicists tried to ...
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76 views

### Why a second edition of EGA was never published?

Grothendieck's Éléments de géométrie algébrique, also known as EGA, was originally devised to consist of thirteen volumes (as stated in the introduction of the first volume), from which Grothendieck ...
1 vote
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### Golden Gnomon inside an Equilateral Triangle - Hermetic Symbol. Have you seen this object?

This has been discovered in a Jacobean publication. It houses Albrecht Durer's Vesica Piscis. There are 3 other properties that were all illustrated on the discovery, that's how I found them. They are ...
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152 views

### How did Copernicus find the nodes of Mars? what were they?

I'm trying to find the location of the nodes of Mars (i.e., the point of intersection between the ecliptic and Mars's plane [rather I should say Mars average plane]) given by Copernicus. According to ...
• 261
1 vote
99 views

### Early results on the Fourier transform

Published tables of Fourier transform pairs have been available for many years. One such example is the paper by George Campbell in the Bell Systems Technical Journal in 1928. Most such tables simply ...
• 135
130 views

### Origin of the usage of $\lambda$ to represent eigenvalues

I'm curious whether anyone knows how $\lambda$ came to be used to represent eigenvalues and or who (if anyone) was responsible for the convention. I've looked through a couple of books on the history ...
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130 views

### Was Niklas Luhmann critical of environmental movements?

A number of years ago, during the break at a social theory seminar, someone mentioned that Niklas Luhmann was highly critical of environmental movements. Since the seminar was more about systems ...
132 views

### What is the title of the 1676 Memoir in which Leibniz first used the Chain Rule?

On Wikipedia it says: "The chain rule seems to have first been used by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He used it to calculate the derivative. He first mentioned it in a 1676 memoir [ Chain Rule ...
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85 views

### What research articles were inspired by web comics?

Currently, I'm doing a PhD on the applications of algorithms to generate timelines of textual content. Recently, I found an article entitled "StoryFlow: Tracking the Evolution of Stories" by ...
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