420 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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### What is the modern significance of Theaetetus's classification of quadratic irrationals?

Before Eudoxus's theory of proportion there was a theory of irrationals based on continued fraction expansions, which Fowler calls anthyphairesis. Theaetetus is said to develop a classification of ...
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### Did Kontsevich start a lecture with “one I will not define, the other nobody knows how to define, and we will be proving that they are equivalent”?

The story was circulating in early 2000s, so presumably it happened in 1990s. Kontsevich, it goes, opened a lecture course on mirror symmetry with:"This course is about two categories. One I will not ...
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### When did people know that all real polynomials of degree greater than 2 are reducible?

Admittedly, this may not be a research level question, but I am deeply curious about this. Let $f(x) \in \mathbb{R}[x]$, and write $d = \deg f$. It is well known that if $\deg f > 2$, then $f$ is ...
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### A basic mistake by Cayley

Arthur Cayley's first paper on abstract groups, in 1854, can be found in his Collected Papers on the Internet Archive, starting at https://archive.org/stream/collectedmathema02cayluoft#page/122/mode/...
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### What was the typical format of a 16th century mathematical debate?

In The Equation that Couldn't be Solved, Mario Livio writes of academia in 16th century Bologna. Apparently, mathematicians would take part in public debates, sometimes involving solving problems. ...
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### Conditionally convergent series

I am looking for the original reference discussing a specific, elementary example of a rearrangement of series converging to a value different from the original series. In what follows, I give some (...
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### How did Weyl's 1918 paper; Gravitation and Electricity, influence classical physics?

The main-stream view seems to be that Weyl's 1918 paper Gravitation and Electricity was initially considered a failure for reasons first pointed out by Einstein. But these initial ideas were reapplied ...