# Tag Info

27

No. The library of Congress has a well-organized website of Garfield's papers, and he did not publish anything on mathematics other than that one note on the Pythagorean theorem in April 1, 1876 issue of the New-England Journal of Education. Perhaps in a gesture to the publication date, the editor mislabeled it pons asinorum (the bridge of asses), the ...

15

In theoretical physics, the celebrated 1948 Alpher–Bethe–Gamow paper, or αβγ paper on cosmic nucleosynthesis. Bethe's name was thrown in, unbeknownst to him, at first, as a practical joke, for which G Gamow was notorious, to rhyme with the Greek alphabet; but it is not as though his friend Bethe, the pioneer of nucleosynthesis, was alien to the field. The ...

8

The main contribution of Napoleon to math was his strong support of the new education system established by the revolutionary government some time before he came to power. For example, he re-established Ecole Normale Superieure which was previously closed by the Consulate. This became one of the top institutions of mathematics education and research. He also ...

6

I have a paper with 5 co-authors which was written and submitted to a journal without my approval, and even without notifying me about it. The editor handling the paper informed me about it but it was published without my approval. The good outcome was that as a result of this paper my Erdos number is 2 because one of the 5 co-authors was a co-author of ...

5

Ok, here is another tale, not sure how much of it I believe, taken from Chapter 3 of the book George E. Martin, Geometric Constructions, Springer-Verlag, 1998. The chapter begins with: In December of 1797 there took place in Paris a brilliant gathering of prominent writers and scholars, with the immortal Lagrange and Laplace among them. A most conspicuous ...

5

Probably the most famous historical example is the Tartaglia-Cardano affair, where Cardano published the solution to a case of depressed cubic he learned from Tartaglia in Ars Magna after swearing on the Gospels not to do it, see e.g. Feldmann, The Cardano-Tartaglia Dispute and Why is "Cardano's Formula" (wrongly) attributed to him? Tartaglia was ...

4

Plato does not define perfect numbers anywhere. The earliest extant definition is in Euclid VII, def. 22. Although Plato uses the term "perfect number" I do not think it certain that he understood this phrase in the same way as Euclid.

4

It is easy to name some of these "smart people". Andrei Kolmogorov proposed a mathematical model for probability in his book Grundbegriffe der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung (Foundations of probability theory), Berlin: Julius Springer, (1933). This model is commonly accepted nowadays. This was a final step of a long development (Emile Borel, Francesco ...

4

See this oeis entry. This can be easily reduced to Ramanujan-Nagell problem. It was conjectured by Ramanujan in 1913 and resolved by Nagell in 1948 (where the year 1930 come from is not clear).

4

Riemann wrote his paper on the zeta-function in 1859. He was the first person to consider the zeta-function in the complex plane, first for ${\rm Re}(s) > 1$ and then he worked out an analytic continuation to all of $\mathbf C$ except for a simple pole at $s = 1$. Before Riemann the only way the zeta-function was used was on the real line: real numbers ...

4

Thanks to Google Scholar, I found out that my name was listed on this 2014 paper without the knowledge of any of the listed co-authors (including myself). I do know the listed co-authors (including the person who published the paper online), and had been working on projects with them, but I did not know that a paper with this title was posted online without ...

3

In 1978, I formulated a summation series equation that yielded the cubes of the counting integers. I sent it to Scientific American, NCTM (The National Council Of Teachers Of Mathematics), and others. In November (1978) in their journal the The Mathematics Student (Vol. 26 No. 2), NCTM published not the equation, but instead the expansion of the summation ...

3

If the film 'The Man Who Knew Infinity' is to be believed, Hardy submitted Ramanujan's paper on highly divisible integers without his (Ramanujan's) knowledge. In more detail, in his book 'The Man ho Knew Infinity: a Life of the Genius Ramanujan, Robert Kanigel states that the paper Ramanujan, S. (1915). "Highly composite numbers" ). Proc. London ...

3

We don't know. The documents we have concerning Egyptian and Babylonian Mathematics do not contain the names of their creators.

2

The correct quote is attributed to Banach: “Good mathematicians see analogies. Great mathematicians see analogies between analogies." Ulam, S. M. (1976). Adventures of a mathematician. New York Note: I used Google Books to find this quote with "Good mathematicians" and "Great mathematicians" as search terms.

2

Grattan-Guinness has an informative book on the history of logic and mathematical foundations, The Search for Mathematical Roots, 1870-1940. There are dedicated chapters on Boole and Cantor, and Boole is mentioned in Cantor's chapter not once. The history of set theory by Ferreirós returns the same null result. Boole's work was only publicized in Germany in ...

2

Not sure if it counts, but the name of Kolmogorov certainly reminded me that according Yaglom (A. N. Kolmogorov as a Fluid Mechanician and Founder of a School in Turbulence Research) Obukhov only learned about his important contributions to the theory of local structure of turbulence being incorporated into the manuscript published by Kolmogorov at a ...

2

As a complement to the last sentence of the answer by Alexandre Eremenko, here is a testimony of the way mathematics had left their imprint in the mind of Napoleon. Here are two excerpts from the very interesting memoirs of baron de Comeau (in "Le tacticien de Napoléon : Mémoires de guerre du Baron de Comeau" available as a Google book). These ...

2

My recollection was incorrect; the game is called Dragon Die, and comes from https://gamebalanceconcepts.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/level-4-probability-and-randomness/. The dice game used historically to abuse perception of probability was named something else (though Dragon Die also satisfies that criterion).

1

Now that Professor Aziz is no more, I have written an obituary, a delayed one. This obituary has appeared in several dailies. Kashmir Reader Rising Kashmir

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible