# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged publishing

38

Documents like the one you linked to were not typed on a typewriter. When writing on typewriters, it was common to leave some space in the document in which the formulas could be inserted by hand. For professional publications, this was then given to a printer (the person, not the machine on your desk ;-)) who hot metal typeset the document. Printers had ...

30

It is really funny to read that in the beginning of 21-st century, some young people may think that journals and books printing had something to do with typewriters:-) If you look attentively at the page you scanned you will easily see that this is not a TeX font and not a typewriter. It is more beautiful. Before the middle 1990s we lived in the "...

23

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 out in German as a draft. Pólya began writing the draft prior to 1940, while he was living in Zürich, and presumably initially intended for the text to be ...

18

In short, because only positive numbers could be used as coefficients at the time there were several cases of the cubic that had to be treated separately. Before Cardano only depressed cubics (with one of the powers missing) were solved. He introduced the substitution that reduces general cubic to a depressed one, and made formulas for depressed ones public ...

14

I cannot name a person. But I can describe what probably happened. (My PhD adviser, A. Goldberg was one of the authors of the second volume (1958-1967), and he told me the story). At some point, this publication was criticized by the people who stood much higher in the Soviet hierarchy than the editorial board. Such decisions were usually made secretly by ...

14

I don't think that they had characters such as these in a typewriter. First off, that wasn't typewritten. Look at the "i"s in $\text{Variationsproblem}$ or the "fl" ligature in $\it\text{Kugelflächenfunction}$ (on the next page of the article). Typewriters use monospaced fonts, and they don't do ligatures. That article was typeset, printed in the venerable ...

14

Archimedes' books, Stomachion and The Method of Mechanical Theorems were lost until rediscovered in 2006. The only known copy is the Archimedes Palimpsest. These two texts comprise many theorems. The Method describes Archimedes' very early use of Riemann sums to compute areas and a variation of Dedekind cuts (via a pair, one a strictly monotonically ...

12

I am afraid, you are overprojecting the power and the glory of peer review. Although some instances can be cited as early as 17th century, it only became what it is today with the triumph of publish or perish in mid 20th, see How did "publish or perish" become the scientific priority rule? Concerning Einstein's papers specifically see Hate the peer-...

11

A textbook case of this is the famous cold fusion debacle. It explains the temptation, if cold fusion worked out, producing a cheap and abundant energy source, there would be a Nobel Prize and world fame. Would all the cut corners still have mattered then? Maybe not that much. Back in the 1960s, Fleischmann noticed that palladium can absorb copious amounts ...

11

As user njuffa has commented, my original answer was not strictly to the letter of the OP. Here are some other examples : Fermi's 1933 paper on the weak interaction. Gell-Mann's 1953 paper on the classification of elementary particles. Higgs' 1964 paper introducing the Higgs Boson/Field - described as unimaginative by the publisher. Ernst's 1966 paper on ...

11

For what it’s worth, here are the languages of the 1645 math/phys paper and book titles from the years 1690–1919 in a bibtex file I have. Of course unscientific with all kinds of biases, but I imagine the catalogues of Reuss (1808), the Royal Society (1800–1883) and Jahrbuch (1868–1942) might give a similar plot. Added (from the same file; graph is smoother ...

10

Looking at a brief history of communication and your post it seems that there were disputes because who originally published the discovery was easily disputable. The fact that there was a steady decline in such disputes was due to improving communication technology AND standard publishing practices. As to the point of using an anagram while publishing. ...

9

Wikipedia has a nice page about the peer-review process, which includes a section on its history: The first recorded editorial pre-publication peer-review process was at the Royal Society of London in 1665 by the founding editor of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg. In the 20th century, peer review became common for ...

9

Probably not what you are really asking. But it seems interesting anyway. This page of Euclid is from the Ninth Century. There is a diagram. It has other modern innovations, such as spaces between words. Source The papyrus fragment below (also Euclid) is from the First Century, one of the earliest known instances of a geometric diagram. Source A ...

9

Two points: @Nick R: I don't think geometers doing pure or analytic geometry wanted to avoid diagrams. They were educated with Euclides, reasoning on figures/diagrams. This trend (doing geometry almost without figures) has flowed like a tsunami especially in the 1970s... Something that has not been underlined enough is the technical limitations of the time....

9

The earliest journals were multidisciplinary, they were published by academies since the second half of 17th century. Before that time, communication was only by books and letters. Letters sometimes were copied and circulated. The first French, English and German journals were: Journal des sçavans, 1665 (published papers in all sciences and humanities) ...

8

Here are some prominent examples of unrecognized discoveries; the actual publications should be easily findable online. Note that I've only included omitted discoveries, not omitted individuals (such as Lise Meitner's omission for nuclear fission, or Chien-Shiung Wu's for parity conservation). I've also only included work whose inventor was still alive when ...

8

Some info from : I.B. Cohen, Introduction to Newton's Principia, 1978, page 138 : No one knows for certain just how large the edition of the Principia was. Rouse Ball reckoned it to be some 250 copies [Ball (1893), Essay, p.67], but A.N.L.Munby held it to be more nearly 300-400 [Munby (1952), "Distribution of the first edition", p.37]. The price ...

7

It is not "attributed to him", because as you mention yourself, everyone knows the story. It is only "named" after him. Very many things are named with other names than their inventors, or discoverers or first persons who proved a them. Some random widely known examples are: Schwarz Lemma (he did not state it in full generality), Schwarz inequality (due to ...

7

You probably mean referees, those who referee papers for the journals. ("Reviewers" is the usual name for those who write the reviews for Math reviews or for Zentralblatt Math. They are payed small amounts per review.) Some journals do pay to the referees. For example, Indiana University Math journal used to offer \$50 per report, I don't know whether this ...

7

The case of Cardano is clear: unlike Tartaglia, he published the result. By modern standards a result has to be published for any claim of priority. People read books and papers and refer on them. Normally mathematicians (and others) are not very much concerned with the question "who really did this first". One reason is that this question rarely has a ...

7

There is no point in giving examples on the second question, because for most truly groundbreaking results this time is really short. On the first question, one can mention almost all results of Archimedes and Apollonius, which had almost no development in antiquity, and during the middle age there were no people who understood them. (People read and ...

7

Discovery of non-Euclidean geometries in 19th century, it took about 40-50 years for them to get accepted.

6

This answer is a bit off because it is not about entire work written in Latin, but until 2012 (with the 'Melbourne' Code of Botanical Nomenclature), it was still required for new species of plants to be described in latin (not just the name but the full diagnosis). As for the zoological nomenclature, it was still common to describe new species in latin until ...

6

Yes, it does. Ignoring the differences between Greek Περὶ, Latin De, etc., the tradition of starting titles with a preposition predates Aristotle, e.g. Eudoxus wrote On Speeds, where he described his astronomical system based on homocentric spheres (the one that Aristotle was elaborating in On Heavens). Modern influence, as for many other things, goes ...

6

From an article by Freeman Dyson: In the year 1865, Maxwell published his paper 'a dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field' ... we, with the advantage of hindsight can clearly see that his paper was the most important event in the 19th C in the history of the physical sciences ... but the importance of Maxwells work was not obvious to his ...

6

It does not appear that Cambridge changed the policy for Ramanujan, although they did use a rather atypical degree they had for him (Bachelor of Arts by Research, not Bachelor of Science by Research). PhD in Mathematics was not traditional in Britain, and was only created after the First World War. Ramanujan was a beneficiary of the general conversion in ...

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