# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged mathematics

11

The same person who introduced it, Cayley. Sylvester first used the term "matrix" (womb in Latin) for an array of numbers in 1848, but did not do much with it. Cayley started developing matrix algebra in 1855 and summarized his theory in A Memoir on the Theory of Matrices (1858). In the opening paragraphs he writes: "It will be, seen that matrices (...

8

This is a collection of open problems concerning various areas in function theory, functional analysis, theory of linear and nonlinear partial differential equations. Seventy Five (Thousand) Unsolved Problems in Analysis and Partial Differential Equations

7

The Grothendieck Circle site suggests a more innocent explanation for the loss these letters. Having left Montpellier in 1984.... In May of that year [1985] a secretary informed him that his office on the fourth floor of the institute had been cleared out. Seeing this incident as an egregious example of the general decline of mores, an outraged ...

6

North Korea has its own academy of science in which there is a mathematics institute. Its mathematicians are trained (mostly) in Russia (formal Soviet Union) and other Eastern European countries like Hungary, East Germany and Poland. North Korea mathematics is far worse than South Koreans in term of research, but is OK in term of application of mathematics ...

4

It is hard to prove that answer is negative, but I suspect that that's the case. That sentence looks familiar. In fact, in his book Relativity: The Special & the General Theory, Einstein wrote “Without it the general theory of relativity […] would perhaps have got no farther than its long clothes.” But here Einstein is talking about ...

4

According to Maley's Higher Order Approximations to Solutions of Transcendental Systems (1960), the earliest occurrence of the inverse quadratic interpolation for finding roots is in Dandelin's Recherches sur la resolution des equations numeriques (1826) published in Nouveaux mémoires de l'Académie royale des sciences et belles-lettres de Bruxelles. Dandelin ...

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 ...

2

I beg to differ with Conifold's answer, and say that in this case the truth is more likely, that we do know why, reasonably well. There are at least two strong practical reasons to study conics, besides the mathematical interest per se, both from physics, precisely optics and acoustics. We do know that the famous Lighthouse of Alexandria had a parabolic ...

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