# Questions tagged [reference-request]

For questions that are requesting specific literature references

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### Source of L’Hôpital’s 1696 Calculus textbook

A calculus textbook I’m using references a calculus book of L’Hôpital in which he illustrates his rule, which is taught in many calculus classes. Does anyone have a source as a scanned PDF? I’d love ...
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### When were cephalopods assigned to the taxonomic phylum Mollusca?

I am fascinated to read about the evolution of cephalopod intelligence while I understand why cephalopods are mollusks (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod), but I cannot easily find when ...
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### Who bet against the usefulness of matrix inversion – or is it a myth?

In my linear-algebra and numerics courses, I frequently heard an anecdote about some professor betting – literally, with money – that there would never be any application where computing the actual ...
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### Lunar distance measurement reference

While preparing trigonometric exercises for my students, I learned that, in 1771, French astronomers determined the distance of the Moon from the Earth by measuring the appropriate angles from both ...
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### Where can I find the historical information or the stats related to Winning WW2 with the minimum actions using The Bombe Machine of Alan Turing?

I am doing a marathon of data visualizations with real world datasets. I am interested in historical war datasets. Does anybody know about the historical data on The Bombe Machine cracking the codes ...
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### What monograph on celestial mechanics did Jürgen Moser coauthor the 2nd and considerably expanded English language edition of with Carl Ludwig Siegel?

Comments under the Space SE question How do orbits around Jacobi ellipsoids behave? include: Periodic orbits around a rotating ellipsoid "This paper extends results obtained during the ...
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### Where can I read Cauchy's terrible poems?

I hope that the slightly abrasive title is forgivable, as the judgement on this poetry is not mine, but Hans Freudenthal's. Here is the background: in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, there is ...
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### Who first spoke of Euclidean domains?

I am looking at Euclidean domains for the first time and it is a subject that has caught my attention. I wonder, who was the first to talk about this? I've been reading a little and so far the oldest ...
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### von Neumann vignette on early computer usage

I'm looking for a vignette about von Neumann. My recollection is as follows but my google-fu is not bringing up anything. von Neumann, having prodigious mathematical capacity even of the most mundane ...
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### Where to pursue a PhD in history of mathematics in Europe?

This is more a soft question, and I am not sure where I should place it so I ask for excuses if this is not the right place, but I could not find any other that seemed more suitable. I would like to ...
95 views

### Quotation reference: "functions which can be evaluated under 1 sec are as good as analytically available"

I have a vague memory of a (possibly-apocryphal) quote by a physicist (I remember it as being Giorgio Parisi, which could be wrong), saying something to the effect of "any function which can be ...