Questions tagged [biographical-details]

For questions about the details of a particular scientist's life.

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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 ...
93 views

Where can I read Cauchy's terrible poems?

I hope that the slightly abrasive title is forgivable, as the judgement on this poetry is not mine, but Hans Freudenthal's. Here is the background: in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, there is ...
2k views

What hair color did Évariste Galois have?

There is one historic black and white portrait of Évariste Galois that is often used [1]. However there are a number of more recent colorful portraits that imagine him to be anything from straw blond[...
65 views

Felix Ehrenhaft was married to Lilly Rona. Einstein and Ehrenhaft regularly met and discussed about magnetic poles or fractional charges. Einstein didn't agree and used his authority to keep Ehrenhaft ...
71 views

Why was André Weil in Finland?

E.g. here it says: During the Second World War André Weil was first imprisoned in Finland, accused of spying, then after being returned to France he was put into Rouen prison convicted of being a ...
71 views

What is the largest academic genealogy tree that we know of?

Many famous scientists are connected by their doctorate advisor-student relations. I wonder if we know which is the largest continuous chain of famous researchers. I have checked pages like ...
73 views

Was Becquerel's discovery of radioactivity inspired by his father?

Becquerel was awarded the Nobel prize for his discovery of radioactivity. He was researching phosphoresence and decided one day to place the stuff he used in a drawer to keep it out of the sun. He put ...
99 views

When were Hermann Amandus Schwarz and Marie Elizabeth Kummer married?

Wikipedia says that Schwarz (b. 1843) marrid Kummer in 1912 at the age of 69, had six children, then died in 1921 at the age of 78. I'm surprised (not against!). According to https://sprague.one-name....
115 views

Is there any relation between strabismus and mathematical or scientific ability?

By looking at the portraits of prominent mathematicians and scientists of the previous centuries it seems like they have a higher incidence of strabismus than the general population of today. Are ...
91 views

How is it possible that Pierre and Marie Curie's daughter Ève was so healthy?

I know that problems caused by radiation are pretty much random and unexpected at low levels of exposition but this randomness begins to be more probable when the exposition grows and this makes me ...
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 ...
114 views

Was Landau interested in the interpretations of quantum mechanics?

I am interested in Lev Landau. I was trying to find what was his approach to the interpretation of quantum mechanics, I am unable to find any particular source were this is discussed. Was he an ...
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 \...
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 ...
99 views

Did Einstein know about Laplace's query into whether gravity is instantaneous?

Here it states, In 1776, Laplace published a memoir in which he first explored the possible influences of a purported luminiferous ether or of a law of gravitation that did not act instantaneously. ...
49 views

Kurt Gödel: a biography

I'm looking for a well-written biographical book about Kurt Gödel. Any titles you'd recommend?
275 views

Who predicted the existence of the muon neutrino?

The Wikipedia article on the muon neutrino says: The muon neutrino is a lepton, an elementary subatomic particle which has the symbol $\nu_\mu$ and no net electric charge. Together with the muon it ...
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?
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 ...
81 views

How well did Cardano understand elementary probabilities, as shown from his writings?

I was recently reading a paper on the historical development of probability theory where Cardano is presented as having discovered some elementary laws of probability in the 1550s. But he is described ...
64 views

What were the likely lives of the highly creative or intellectually gifted people in declining or primitive civilizations?

People living in certain regions throughout history produced little to none recorded intellectual achievements. Assuming that highly creative individuals existed in these regions, are there any ...
62 views

Did Ibn al-Haytham write anything about his experiments that is general enough to be seen as prefiguring the scientific method?

Ibn al-Haytham is considered one of the first experimenters. Since he was also a kind of philosopher did he write anything close in meaning and generality to the scientific method?
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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What were C.S Peirce's contributions to theory of relations?

In my study of Peirce I came across a number statements that he extended De Morgan's relation algebra. What exactly are his contributions to relation algebra?
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 ...
53 views

Did Leibniz ever express any opinion about Aristotle, Plato or Archimedes?

Since Leibniz is known to have expressed opinions about Descartes' and Newton's abilities maybe he did the same for the prominent thinkers of antiquity. Did Leibniz ever express any opinion about ...
45 views

What was the first randomized experiment that was ever conducted?

C.S Peirce is credited by wikipedia with the invention of randomized experiments. What was C.S Peirce's contribution to randomized experiments exactly if there were such experiments before Peirce? How ...
62 views

What was the reason for Grothendiecks 'fast every Monday' in Vietnam?

According to MacTutor article on mathematics in Vietnam ... He visited in November 1967. The first few days we organised his lectures in Hanoi. But one day a missile exploded 100-200m from the ...
69 views

Is there any book or site where John Von Neumann's collected philosophical writings are presented?

I was wondering if Von Neuman has any philosophical writings beside his writings on the relation of computers to the human mind and vice versa.
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Do we know how Feynmans religious views changed throughout his life?

According to Feynman, there was a quota for Jews at American Universities and when he was accepted on a graduate programme - I think at Princeton - they were told "he's Jewish but he doesn't act ...
49 views

Did the brain anatomists and psychophysicists of the early to mid 1800s make any philosophical speculations on the nature of emotions and cognition?

I was wondering if the psychophysicists and brain anatomists from 1800 up until 1860s made any novel, noteworthy philosophical speculations about the emotions and cognition.If they did is there any ...
69 views

Is there any book or site where Gauss' collected philosophical writings are presented?

From the questions on some of Gauss' philosophical ideas here at HSM stackexchange it's clear that Gauss had some major philosophical ideas that despite their profundity don't seem to have had much ...
136 views

How did Charles Sanders Peirce react to his stigmatization?

Do we have any evidence on how Charles Sanders Peirce reacted to his stigmatization by various academics? By stigmatization, I mean denying him tenure at Johns Hopkins, leaving the house when they ...
70 views

Was there a continuation to the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem between Euler and Hamilton?

Since Euler's result on the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem appears to be the first known graph theoretical result I was wondering if any mathematicians after Euler and before Hamilton commented ...
52 views

Was C.S Peirce the first philosopher to posit that value belief serves as some sort of guide for scientific belief?

I remember reading something to the effect that the moral and aesthetic preferences influence scientific belief in his collected works. Was C.S Peirce the first philosopher to posit that value belief ...
89 views

Was C.S Peirce in his abductive reasoning influenced by the generalization from special cases that is used by mathematicians?

I am reading some random bits from Peirce's collected works and they give me the impression that Peirce tried to integrate every(or nearly every) major scientific and mathematical concept which he was ...
48 views

Were these ideas well known during the 1850s in the US?

I was looking at a biography of C.S Peirce where it is shown the following parts of one of his essays which he wrote when he was 15 years old and are presented as evidence of his youthful genius: ...
41 views

What are some facts about Peirce's early precocity?

In some of his online biographies Peirce is described as having showed early signs of precocity. Can someone describe some of these signs of precocity?
87 views

Is there any indication of what mathematics Trotsky studied?

In Isaac Deutscher's, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, he writes of the youthful Trotsky: His stay in Odessa ended in 1896. A realschule normally had seven forms but St. Paul's had only six so ...
409 views

Did C.S Peirce make any noteworthy contributions to physics or chemistry?

According to this article Peirce was the first to experimentally tie a unit, the meter, to an absolute standard, the wavelength of a spectral line Did C.S Peirce make any other noteworthy ...
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
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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.
34 views

What's the history of the heuristics on doing science efficiently and effectively?

I recently read a paper by Taleb about doing science efficiently and effectively and I was wondering if there other predecessors to his work which more or less express the same things(since Taleb ...
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?
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 ...
102 views

Who was the 17th century mathematician "André Jumeau, Prior of Sainte-Croix"?

I'm reading Dickson's History on the Theory of Numbers, and find this on page 34: "The third $P_3$ [that is, triperfect number], discovered by André Jumeau, Prior of Sainte-Croix", is \${P_3}^...
101 views

Complete list of publications of Rebecca Barlow

Rebecca Barlow is the discoverer of an interesting surface in algebraic geometry. Is anybody aware of a full list of her contributions? Has she continued working in mathematics in the 21st century?
294 views

Does Blum's speedup theorem have any conceptual predecessors?

Blum's speedup theorem seems to me that bears at least some superficial resemblance to Godels research on the length of proofs under certain axiomatic systems. Does Blum's speedup theorem has any ...