Newest Questions
4,986 questions
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Any mathematical historians want to collaborate on reporting results by Newton and Lagrange related to the general solution of polynomial equations?
Dear Mathematical Historians:
I'm the second author of a paper on the general solution to polynomial and power series equations just published in the American Mathematical Monthly:
https://www....
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R. F. Prevost's B. Sc. thesis
Do we know if Pope Leo XIV wrote a B. Sc. thesis back in the day? If so, does anybody know which topic was it about?
Thanks in advance for your replies!
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A question on a quote by Jerry L. Bona
According to this web site, Jerry L. Bona stated
"The Axiom of Choice is obviously true, the well-ordering principle obviously false, and who can tell about Zorn's lemma?"
What is a precise ...
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What is the reference for this quote from William Bruce Cameron?
The quote
"However, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
is frequently attribute to Albert Einstein, but a textbook on sociology by William ...
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Physics poem looking for the author or publication
In my physics notebook back in highschool in 1969 there was a poem. I am looking for the author, it went something like this.
“Physics is that science that describes nature with the golden cyphers of ...
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What kind of perturbation theory did Lagrange and Laplace use?
It seems that all moderns texts on celestial mechanics only use canonical perturbation theory. It can come only after Hamilton since he was the inventor of canonical mechanics. However, it is said ...
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Reconciling two different published versions of a letter from Dedekind to Weber
In Dedekind's Gesammelte Werke, in a commentary on "Zweite Definition (1889.3.9) des Endlichen und Unendlichen" (p. 450), Noether quotes from a letter Dedekind wrote to Weber, starting at
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"Deciphering a Leibniz Manuscript: The Origin of His Square Root of 2 Series
While doing some research on Leibniz’s legacy, I came across this blog post by Stephen Wolfram that features Leibniz’s manuscripts. In one of the images, there appears a series for the square root of ...
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Did Percival Treite make any lasting contributions to modern medicine?
Treite was considered a very gifted researcher in medicine as this excerpt from an assessment by Prof. Stoeckel on December 18, 1943, on the occasion of his habilitation to the Rector of the ...
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A physical perspective on Riemann's mathematics
In the Bottazzini's article Naturphilosophie and its role in riemann's mathematics pp.7-8
Riemann made the surface simply connected with suitable transversal cuts and analysed the behaviour of the ...
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Where does this quote from Francisco Gomes Teixeira stem from?
It is stated many places online, e.g. here, that Francisco Gomes Teixeira expressed
«Os números são as regras dos seres, e a matemática, é o regulamento do mundo.»
If so, where was it expressed?
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Who is the first to use $\{\,\}$ to denote the empty set?
Question
Many people use $\{\,\}$ to denote the empty set (see wikipedia), but who was the first to do so? From the link, Frege uses $\{\,\}$ to denote the empty set, but I don't find such uses in ...
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The Manhattan project: Was David Greenglass' drawing of this high explosive lens mold ever constructed in 3D?
While watching a World War II documentary they showed an image drawn by David Greenglass from the Manhattan project to pass on to the Soviets. The drawing depicts a high explosive lens mold used to ...
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Goal of general index theorem
There are various index theorem such as Atiyah-Singer index theorem and Chern-Gauss-Bonnet theorem. If we look at the theorems corresponding to the index theorem, they are all defined on a compact ...
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Are Nieuwentijt's infinitesimals a precursor to SIA's nilsquare infinitesimals?
I read in some sources that Nieuwentijt’s infinitesimals can be precursor of nilsquare infinitesimals in Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis (see Is Mathematical History
Written by the Victors?, pp. 12):
J....
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