82
votes
Accepted
What's the famous story about a mathematician who gave a talk without saying a word?
You are most likely referring to the 1903 presentation by American mathematician Frank Cole. The original false conjecture was that the 67-th Mersenne number $M_{67}:=2^{67}-1$ is prime, and it goes ...
- 70.1k
50
votes
Accepted
Is it true that Albert Einstein was kicked out of high school due to his "peacefulness"?
The most important resource with regard to Albert Einstein's biography are Princeton University's Collected Papers. Particularly relevant to the question is John Stachel (ed.), The Collected Papers of ...
- 4,431
42
votes
Accepted
What hair color did Évariste Galois have?
Galois was imprisoned twice, at Sainte-Pélagie prison in 1831 and at La Force prison in 1832. The prison records are apparently retained in French archives.
His prison record from Sainte-Pélagie is ...
- 4,431
26
votes
Accepted
Was Kolmogorov enraged after learning about the Karatsuba multiplication algorithm?
Karatsuba's own report can be found in his 1995 paper Сложность вычислений (Complexity of computations). The phrasing he uses is "сильно взволновалo", which Google does translate as "...
- 70.1k
26
votes
Accepted
Which mathematician traveled to and moved in with each collaborator?
The man is Paul Erdős. As pointed out by the OP in the comments, his "nomadic" lifestyle is briefly mentioned in the Brown Numbers - Numberphile video, 3.05-3.30. It is also concisely ...
- 70.1k
25
votes
What was the relationship between Einstein and Minkowski?
A good account is Weinstein, Max Born, Albert Einstein and Hermann Minkowski's Space-Time Formalism of Special Relativity. They did no have much of a relationship, what it was is well-summarized by ...
- 70.1k
23
votes
Accepted
Was Pólya’s “How To Solve It” originally written in German or English (or some other language)?
How To Solve It was originally published in English in 1945 by Princeton University Press in English, after being rejected by three other U.S. publishers.
However, the original text at least started ...
- 2,742
23
votes
Accepted
Does Arnold say that Hardy is responsible for Ramanujan's untimely death?
I think it is fairly obvious from the quote that Arnold is blaming Hardy's neglect for Ramanujan's death. The real question is whether his charge is supported by evidence. Arnold's evidence comes ...
- 70.1k
21
votes
What was different about Planck's quantization of light compared to Einstein's?
Unlike Einstein, Planck did not quantize electromagnetic waves themselves, only the exchanged energies, and even them only statistically. So the other two questions have no satisfactory answer because ...
- 70.1k
21
votes
Accepted
Who was Richard Thompson?
I was only able to find fragmentary information on Thompson. A good starting point is his PhD thesis, which gives us his full name:
Richard Joseph Thompson, Transformational Structure of Algebraic ...
- 4,431
20
votes
Accepted
What were 12 year old Pitts' objections to Principia Mathematica?
This story bears characteristic signs of a tall tale, although in this case one can identify the origin. It appears to be an amalgamation of two anecdotes, neither of which is itself very credible. ...
- 70.1k
20
votes
Accepted
What is the origin of the negation ( ¬ ) operator from logic?
If vague resemblance is enough, then "$¬$" resembles "$-$", which denotes negation in arithmetic. Lambert in Sechs Versuche einer Zeichenkunst in der Vernunftlehre (1782) and Boole ...
- 70.1k
19
votes
Claims of mathematical breakthroughs while in an altered state of consciousness?
Scientists and mathematicians rarely self-report on psychological circumstances of their creative process, at best presenting a rationalization of their path to discovery. Kekule's dream and Kepler's ...
- 70.1k
19
votes
Is this Einstein rejection letter fake?
According to this, it's a modern fabrication:
Although Einstein’s initial application for a doctorate at the University of Bern (he had previously been awarded a PhD by the University of Zürich in ...
- 5,211
18
votes
Accepted
What attracted Einstein to the anomalous precession of Mercury?
Who or what attracted Einstein's attention to Mercury, and when? What
alerted him to the idea that Mercury's case was different from all
those other cases, when a mundane explanation was involved?
I ...
- 1,866
18
votes
Accepted
What did Fermat do as a lawyer?
Fermat wasn't so much a "lawyer" as a magistrat which means that he sat on successively higher levels of the Parlement of Toulouse, France. This period (17th century) was before the emergence of the ...
- 3,759
18
votes
Accepted
Did Richard Feynman ever meet Stephen Hawking or comment on Hawking radiation?
I take that your primary goal is to know what Feynman thought of Hawking's work. While it is possible that they have met I would consider it unlikely given that Feynman mentioned several times how his ...
- 678
18
votes
Accepted
Who was D.A. Millin, the eponym of the Millin Series?
I am the author of the Advanced Problem H-237 to the FQ issue Vol. 14 no. 2 (1976). The series in that Problem was later named the Millin series. At that time, I was a senior at the Annville-Cleona ...
- 396
18
votes
Accepted
Inscriptions on Newton's tomb
Another picture of the scroll, but taken from a different angle, appeared in: Greg Priest, Silvia De Toffoli, Paula Findlen, "Tools of Reason: The Practice of Scientific Diagramming from ...
- 4,431
17
votes
Accepted
What kind of mathematical education did Leibniz have?
Mauro Allegranza's comment pretty much says it all but to elaborate a bit one could mention that Leibniz came to mathematics rather late in his intellectual career and was essentially a self-educated ...
- 3,759
17
votes
Accepted
Did Grothendieck really say that he felt "clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track"?
Yes, the quote is essentially authentic. This is from a typeset version "Récoltes et Semailles", specfically from "2.2 L’importance d’être seul." (To find the document online should be possible ...
- 1,441
17
votes
Literary works authored by mathematicians
Bertrand Russell wrote many books and essays on philosophy and social justice, and was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature.
And the Persian mathematician Omar Khayyám wrote poetry: quatrains that ...
- 271
16
votes
Accepted
Who are some great scientists/mathematicians with not-so-great pre/mid-career credentials?
One of the most recent famous examples is Yitang Zhang, who proved in 2013 that, if $p_i$ denote primes, then
$$ \liminf_{n\to\infty} (p_{n+1}-p_n)<7\times 10^7$$
i.e. there are infinitely many ...
Danu♦
- 3,802
16
votes
Why was Rene Descartes not knighted?
The French word for "knight" is "chevalier". Descartes did not need to be knighted; he inherited the title "chevalier" and was frequently called "Chevalier du Peron" or "Chevalier Seigneur du Peron", ...
- 3,385
16
votes
Literary works authored by mathematicians
Hausdorff wrote many literary and philosophical works, including poems and a play, under the pseudonym Paul Mongré.
- 261
16
votes
Accepted
In a popular anecdote, who took 20 minutes to decide that a thing was obvious?
The closest to an attribution that I could find is by Matt Calhoun on Math SE, who claims "it was personally told to me" by "my mechanics professor (G. Horton) [who] took lectures from Pauli..." G. ...
- 70.1k
15
votes
Accepted
Who is the second person Kolmogorov supposedly thought possessed some kind of "higher intelligence"?
It is indeed the author. In an interview (see page 41) Arnold is more explicit:
он [Gelfand] был, как и я, учеником Колмогорова – Андрей Николаевич говаривал даже, что «только в беседах с этими ...
- 330
15
votes
Claims of mathematical breakthroughs while in an altered state of consciousness?
Paul Erdős was a mathematician noted for his prolific contributions to the science of mathematics as well as a proclivity for the use of amphetamines. His friend Ronald Graham famously bet him $500 (...
- 251
14
votes
Whose shoulders did Newton stand on?
Newton implicitly refers to the medieval physicists who had such a profound affect on the intellectual atmosphere of Galileo et al. that they took their discoveries as common knowledge. Some of the ...
- 5,211
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible