Unanswered Questions
869 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 ...
CommunityBot
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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 ...
CommunityBot
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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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Did Kronecker say that set theory is not mathematics?
I have frequently come across Kronecker's statement about set theory:
I don't know what predominates in Cantor's theory - philosophy or theology, but I am sure that there is no mathematics there.
It ...
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Did Walter Pitts refuse to allow his name to be made publicly available?
I read on the Wikipedia page on Walter Pitts that :
Pitts was also described as an eccentric, refusing to allow his name
to be made publicly available. He refused all offers of advanced
...
Danu♦
- 3,681
12
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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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How were contour plots of complex functions produced in the days of mechanical differential analyzers?
I was reading an old paper (specifically, the first appearance of the Pearcey function, here) and I was struck by the beauty of the plots it contains, particularly for a paper from 1945-46:
Pearcey ...
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Why are the classic statistical approaches to NLP mostly generative models while the most recent ones are mostly discriminative?
Looking at the classic statistical approaches to natural language processing (e.g. tagging, parsing, etc.), I see that they are mostly generative models: n-gram models, Naive Bayes classifiers, hidden ...
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Origin of the special Finnish notation for difference of antiderivative
Apologies for a question that is specific to one country (but perhaps others find it a curious example of how mathematical notation can vary between countries).
In Finnish calculus texts, if $F$ is an ...
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First use of term "Hilbert's Nullstellensatz"
This year (2021) marks the 100th anniversary of Emmy Noether's 1921 paper in which she introduced Noetherian rings and proved the primary ideal decomposition for them. The original version of her ...
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Whence “homomorphism”, “homomorphic”?
The kernel question leads to another : Today, homomorphism (resp. isomorphism) means what Jordan (1870) had called isomorphism (resp. holoedric isomorphism). How did the switch happen?
“Homomorphic” ...
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Ramanujan's Method for solving cubic, quartic, quintic
In Ramanujan's Notebooks Volume IV pg. 31 by Bruce C. Berndt, he describes an easy way to solve the general quartic by starting with the system$$x^2+ay=b\\y^2+cx=d\tag1$$
And solving for $x$; which ...
CommunityBot
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On the history of population dynamics of territorial species
I am interested in the historical priority in population biology, essays or monographs, discussing the concept of territoriality prior to 1950.
What is it? In the early 18th century discussions of ...
Danu♦
- 3,681
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Contemporary reactions to the rise of axiomatization in the 19th/20th centuries
Starting somewhere in the 19th century, mathematics turned from the study of concrete objects to the study of objects satisfying enough properties to lead to interesting theorems. For example:
From ...
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