Podcast #128: We chat with Kent C Dodds about why he loves React and discuss what life was like in the dark days before Git. Listen now.

# Tag Info

19

It is not random. These names are of Greek origin, and -ic or -ics are Anglicizations of the Greek suffix -ikos, which meant "pertaining to". In other languages it can be rendered as -ika or -ica, Wolfram's "Mathematica" uses such a version. From the Online Etymology Dictionary: "-ics in the names of sciences or disciplines (acoustics, aerobics, ...

7

Feynman is being... liberally creative. What he says is his own interpolation that "makes sense" from the perch of today. "Must have been psychologically wonderful", perhaps, but "freeing of man from the intimidation of the ancients" is not how the men of Renaissance generally felt. The intimidation they sought the freeing from was not of the ancients, but ...

3

One would think that Russian usage stems from Kolmogorov's seminal works on probability. However, in Über die Summen durch den Zufall bestimmter unabhängiger Größen (1928) he uses $\mathfrak{M}$ to denote probability (presumably from messen, measure), not mathematical expectation. In the famous Grundbegriffe der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung (1933), which gave ...

3

The answer to your question in the title is definitely yes. For example, Fermat wrote in a letter: "Perhaps, posterity will thank me for having shown that the ancients did not know everything". Fermat lived a century after Tartaglia, and the general opinion was still that "the ancients knew everything". This opinion began to change only after the invention ...

1

For a history of decimal fractions see Smith's History Of Mathematics, vol II, pp. 238ff. In the Middle East, Smith gives credit to al-Kashi (c.1400), but the relevant algorithms, in a table notation, appear already in al-Samawal (c.1150), see Katz's History of Mathematics, 7.2.3. Notationally, the fractional separator was initially a bar placed over the ...

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