# Tag Info

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### How was curvature originally defined and calculated?

Apollonius (c. 262–190 BC) "calculated" curvature of conic sections implicitly when solving the problem of drawing normals to them in book V of Conica, but he did not think of it as a ...
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### What is the original source for Abel's quote about Gauss:"He is like the fox, who effaces his tracks in the sand with his tail"?

Bjerknes cites a letter from Abel to Christopher Hansteen, a fellow professor of Bjerknes at Christiania/Oslo, who had put up and mentored Abel in the beginning of his career. Den omgangskreds af ...
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### What theorem of Sophus Lie on the number of geometries is H. Poincaré referring to?

Poincare refers to the Lie's solution of the so-called problem of space, a.k.a. the Helmholtz , or Riemann-Helmholtz, or Helmholtz-Lie problem of space, which amounts to characterizing all manifolds (...
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### Source for Hilbert's famous quote "Mathematics in Göttingen? There really is none anymore"

In my grandfather's book, lately translated from German: Recollections of a Jewish Mathematician in Germany, by Abraham A. Fraenkel, edited by Jiska Cohen-Mansfield, translated by Allison Brown. ...
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User plannapus points out that the proposer of the ad links to the original source, which is the first page of Diophantus’s Arithmetica, specifically the 1621 translation by Claude Gaspard Bachet de ...
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### What was the main language in science/mathematics before 1850

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 ...
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### Did Einstein say "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them"?

I am afraid there is no original source. Wikipedia has talk pages where sourcing is discussed, and its editors did extensive searches on this one and its variants. It is listed under the heading ...
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### Some references for Vladimir Arnold's thesis "Mathematics is a part of physics"?

First, on the question in the narrow sense the answer is in the negative, I am afraid, although there are some other places where Arnold expresses his views on mathematics: An apologia for Applied ...
• 65.8k
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### How did Young perform his double slit experiment?

Young's original setup demonstrating interference of light was not double slit but sunbeam splitting with a single thin card. He presented a paper On the theory of Light and Color to the Royal Society ...
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### Did Gauss say "there have been but three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton and Eisenstein"?

Wikipedia also says:"this is not a quote by Gauss, but is (a translation of) the end of a sentence from the biography of Eisenstein by Moritz Cantor (1877), one of Gauss's last students and a ...
• 65.8k
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### Where did Rayleigh derive the ultraviolet catastrophe?

The short answer is that you can not find it because it does not exist, Rayleigh never derived the "ultraviolet catastrophe". Chapter VI of Kuhn's book on the history of quantum mechanics reads: "...
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### Did Srinivasa Ramanujan have a surviving sibling?

There were actually two surviving brothers: source See also page 12 of Robert Kanigel's biography of Ramanujan.
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### History of irreducible polynomials and motivation for them

I will skip the pre-history of solving polynomial equations and factoring polynomials. Let me mention that the analogy between long division of numbers and polynomials goes back to medieval Islamic ...
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### A branch of mathematics which refused to be rigorous?

You might be looking for the Italian School of Algebraic Geometry. It has become the canonical example of problems with a lack of rigour. The short summary is that the school started with some ...
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