New answers tagged biographical-details
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Concerning the note "About the frequency of optical double stars", i think that Gauss attempted to solve in this note a kind of probabilistic problem that is relevant to astronomy. Gauss tries to find a pattern in the most updated maps of stars up to his time - what is the fraction of double stars in a ball (sphere with volume) centred at the earth, among a ...
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Here is a picture. The page is taken from Chapter 2, "Frequency Domain Analysis" in Dennis Silage, "Analog and Digital Communications." Where did Silage find the photograph I do not know, you can email him and ask.
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In general, transformation of elliptic integrals (or differentials) is
finding algebraic solutions $F(x,y)=0$ of a differential equation
$$\frac{dx}{\sqrt{f(x)}}=\frac{dy}{\sqrt{g(y)}},$$
where $f,g$ are polynomials of degree 3.
First such transformation was discovered by Landen in 1775, and it is called Landen's transformation. Independently it was ...
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It is true that after 1914 (and the "Foundations of General Relativity" article), Einstein only published a few articles, exclusively replies to criticism, in the Annalen der Physik. The major reason why he shifted away from that journal was simply because he was elected in 1914 to membership in the Prussian Academy of Science. There he could publish ...
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No, Lawrence did not increase the amount, but in 1940 Segre got a contract directly from University of California that brought his monthly salary back to $300. Below are details.
From Segre's memoirs "A Mind Always in Motion: the Autobiography of Emilio Segrè." Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993.
In 1939, \$300 a month was a good ...
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Andrew Weil, the mathematician was in Finland when WWII broke out and he was arrested on suspicions of spying; in fact, it was during his internment in Rouen he did the work he was most famous for and he wrote a letter to his wife saying:
My mathematics work is proceeding beyond my wildest hopes, and I am even a bit worried - if it's only in prison that I ...
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Check out the wikipedia article where they explain:
At the time when Viviani asserts that the experiment took place, Galileo had not yet formulated the final version of his law of free fall. He had, however, formulated an earlier version which predicted that bodies of the same material falling through the same medium would fall at the same speed.
...
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This is an anecdote, probably invented to complement the other anecdote about Laplace. It is hard to say why Lagrange in particular was picked to fill the part, as he is a bad fit. Probably, it is just that he was seen with Napoleon at Mass, and the name is suitably famous. Many Lagrange's works are translated into English, e.g. his opus magnum Analytical ...
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Contrary to Antommarchi's "The Last Moments of Napoleon", the text Talks of Napoleon at St. Helena quotes Napoleon (bottom of page 274):
Napolean replies: How comes it, then, that Laplace was an atheist? At the Institute neither he nor Monge, nor Bertollet, nor Lagrange believe in God.
Similarly, from Morris Kline's Mathematics and the Search for ...
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This story has been depicted in The Theory of Everything, a 2014 biographical romantic drama film directed by James Marsh detailing the life of the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking.
In an early scene, it has been shown that Stephen Hawking, who has just begun his PhD at the University of Cambridge, and other fellow students was given a problem set of ...
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