33
votes
Historical example of research papers being misinterpreted due to poor wording and creating controversy?
Giovanni Schiaparelli ...
He wrote in 1877 about his telescopic observations of Mars. He described some features using the Italian word canali. English translation would be channels. But the term ...
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31
votes
Has a stereotypical "mad scientist" ever made a significant discovery?
I would say that Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) fits this description. A hugely rich man (at the time of his death he was the largest depositor in the Bank of England) he was also a loner in a huge scale....
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26
votes
Did Galileo Galilei believe in astrology?
Galileo not only believed but taught and actively practiced astrology, like Ptolemy and Kepler before him. His primary source might have been Porphyry’s commentary on Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos. In ...
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18
votes
Examples of papers co-authored by parent/child, or siblings
Check out these mathematicians: A father, and two sons, all of whom
co-authored papers in various combinations.
David Borwein, father
Peter Borwein, son
Jonathan Borwein, son
Peter's memorial to ...
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17
votes
Accepted
What major areas of mathematics have been abandoned?
I would say that no area of mathematics has ever been completely abandoned. The areas go in and out of fashion, but nothing seems to be completely abandoned.
For example, approximately in 1940's most ...
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17
votes
Instances of suppression of scientific ideas
In Soviet Union, in 1948 genetics was officially banned. Researchers in genetics
had either co confess publicly that they were doing pseudo-science and switch to another activity, or were dismissed. ...
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17
votes
Accepted
Did Grothendieck really say that he felt "clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track"?
Yes, the quote is essentially authentic. This is from a typeset version "Récoltes et Semailles", specfically from "2.2 L’importance d’être seul." (To find the document online should be possible ...
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14
votes
Accepted
What are some of the earliest mentions of scientific "cranks"?
There are lots of references to cranks in A Budget of Paradoxes, by Augustus de Morgan (1806–1871), who calls them “paradoxers”. There, he writes
[…] I say something on my ...
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14
votes
Has a stereotypical "mad scientist" ever made a significant discovery?
The most commonly mentioned name in this context is Nicola Tesla, he is even featured as such in some fiction (e.g. Tomorrowland). He was brilliant, eccentric, kept to himself, and had some wacky ...
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14
votes
Accepted
Did Bacon analogize planets to holes in the head to explain why their number was (believed to be) seven?
This probably refers to the "argument" of the Florentine astronomer Francesco Sizzi against the validity of Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter. His "argument" was ...
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13
votes
Examples of papers co-authored by parent/child, or siblings
Elie and Henri Cartan (father and son) published a paper together, in 1931 (Les transformations des domaines cerclés bornés).
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13
votes
Examples of papers co-authored by parent/child, or siblings
Arthur Leonard Rubin co-authored at least two papers with his mother, Jean Estelle Hirsh Rubin, the first one below when he was 13 years old.
Arthur L. Rubin and Jean E. Rubin, Extended operations ...
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13
votes
Has a stereotypical "mad scientist" ever made a significant discovery?
André Bloch is an extreme case: He murdered three of his family members. Being institutionalised for the rest of his life, he wrote influential mathematical papers (on complex analysis). Quote from ...
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12
votes
Examples of papers co-authored by parent/child, or siblings
Brothers Marcel and Frigyes Riesz have a joint paper,
Brothers Rolf and Frithiof Nevanlinna have 6 joint papers.
Brothers Alexander and Alexei Zamolodchikov have 8 joint papers.
Brothers David and ...
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11
votes
Accepted
What were Hilbert's weekly 1933 lectures on "matters of general intellectual interest" about?
Here is MacLane's sentence about the lectures in its entirety:
"Although the leading mathematician, David Hilbert, had retired and came only once a week to lecture on matters of general ...
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11
votes
Did Renaissance mathematicians once consider themselves inferior to the great ancient mathematicians?
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 &...
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10
votes
Examples of papers co-authored by parent/child, or siblings
Luis Alvarez and his son Walter, and two other chemists, co-authored this 1980 paper on iridium levels at the K/T boundary. The Alvarezes conjectured the now widely accepted impact hypothesis ...
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10
votes
Accepted
Where did the term "set-builder notation" come from?
The nickname appears to be a creation of the New Math movement, and spread from the math education literature.
The notation itself in its modern form can be traced back to Lefschetz's Algebraic ...
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9
votes
What major areas of mathematics have been abandoned?
Geometry
I'm not sure you can really call geometry abandoned, but it certainly was much more popular a few hundred years ago (discovery of spherical geometry and hyperbolical geometry, parallel axiom ...
- 3,132
9
votes
Examples of papers co-authored by parent/child, or siblings
Greg Kuperberg, mathematician and son of the couple of mathematicians Wlodymierz and Krystina Kuperberg, published, separately, a paper with his father on geometric combinatorics, at the very start of ...
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9
votes
Has a stereotypical "mad scientist" ever made a significant discovery?
Besides the other excellent answers, maybe Georg Cantor could fit your description, with some serious caveats. Although the details of his life have been extremely romanticized (e.g. the widespread ...
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9
votes
Did Galileo Galilei believe in astrology?
The Galileo's astrology activities are well summarized in Conifold's answer. But, in relevance to the question at hand (did he believe it worked) I'd like to make a couple of points:
The fact that ...
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9
votes
Accepted
What sort of science is satirized in Hogarth's Weighing House?
Clubbe's Physiognomy, where the etching is the frontispiece, is accessible on Internet Archive. Clubbe's target was the so-called pneumatology ("science of spirit"), a popular in the 18th ...
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8
votes
Accepted
Indiana Pi Bill: Other attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat?
It seems that this attempt made an impression, when one needs to make the point Indiana Pi itself is typically invoked. NMSR Reports modeled their 1998 April Fool's story on it:
"NASA engineers and ...
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8
votes
Examples of papers co-authored by parent/child, or siblings
Richard K. Guy - well known for work in recreational mathematics, and son Michael J. T. Guy - computer scientist and mathematician, co-published the paper "On rational Morley triangles" in Acta ...
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8
votes
Examples of papers co-authored by parent/child, or siblings
Ken Ono published a paper with his father Takashi Ono in 1996: ``Quadratic forms and elliptic curves, III'' in Proc. Japan Acad. Ser. A Math. Sci. 72 (1996), no. 9, 204–205.
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8
votes
Examples of papers co-authored by parent/child, or siblings
There are four Polish brothers ( Ryszard, Pawel, Michal and Karol Horodecki) all working in quantum information science, and they have several common papers.
Their most cited paper (with $>5000$ ...
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8
votes
Examples of papers co-authored by parent/child, or siblings
I am aware that this is a physics answer rather than mathematics, but in science probably the most famous example is William Bragg and son Lawrence Bragg who did pioneering experimental work with X-...
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