Newest Questions
4,986 questions
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What were some telling statements on truth and provability before Gödel?
Gödel's incompleteness theorems of 1931 were clearly surprising, as well as important discoveries.
Take a statement on truth and provability to be telling if it was posed by a recognized mathematician,...
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When did astrology pass out of medicine?
From the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, a 14th century collection of narrative poems:
With us ther was a Doctour of Phisik;
In all this world ne was ther noon hym lik,
To speke of phisik ...
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Where did von Neumann get this idea about mind?
Reading the book Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics of von Neumann,I found an interesting quote in chapter VI, where the author tries to "solve" the apparent paradox that one ...
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Was Erdős the source for characterizations involving machines that convert coffee?
There is a familiar mock characterization often attributed to Erdős Pál to the effect of
Definition. A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.
In one of my grad courses in CS, ...
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Paul Erdős and the status of combinatorics
Remembering a sentence I read somewhere, according to which Paul Erdős has been a major actor in the promotion of combinatorics outside recreational mathematics, I took a look at a few historical ...
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In what document was the expression "differential equation" first used?
Without providing a source, Ince's book (1920) claims that the expression aequatio differentialis (differential equation) was first used by Leibniz in 1676. This information is repeated in many other ...
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Who was the first person to call algebraic geometry 'algebraic geometry'?
As far as I know, the history of algebraic geometry goes back to Apollonius of ancient Greece, but it seems that the name 'algebraic geometry' was used relatively recently. So, my question is this. ...
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Who first showed the famous best worst case complexity on sorting algorithms?
It is common knowledge that a sorting algorithm based on comparisons cannot have a worst case complexity better than $O(n \log n)$.
This can be demonstrated by a counting argument on the number of ...
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Examples of recordings of the transit of Venus before the 17th century?
Looking for the history of the observations of the transit of Venus, it seems that the first formal observation was in 1639 by Horrocks and Crabtree. However this observation happens during the times ...
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Do we know what books Euler read/worked through while studying with Johann Bernoulli at the University of Basel?
I've been reading Gautschi's brief biographical review of Euler in which he quotes Euler's autobiography (as provided in Fellmann's biography of Euler) a passage about Euler's study with Johann ...
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Square root defined as a positive value: why?, when? who?
In the Mathematics Educators Stack Exchange, a poster asked whether $\sqrt 4$ could be considered as both $+2$ and $-2$. However, in modern mathematics, $\sqrt 4$ is conventionally defined as $+2$. I ...
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I’d like to know André Weil’s assessment of Ramanujan
I found it ironic while researching this that Weil, despite his fascination in India and being one of the 20th century’s greatest number theorists alongside Ramanujan, barely wrote about him. (...
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Where did this quote on vectors by Lord Kelvin originate?
The following quote by Lord Kelvin appeared in a post to Physics Forum:
Symmetrical equations are good in their place, but ‘vector’ is a useless survival, or offshoot from quaternions, and has never ...
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Riemann's letter to Gauss
I happened to find on this site a letter Riemann sent to his teacher Gauss in 1850. However, since the handwriting in this letter is not very legible, I searched through various contents to find the ...
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Could you recommend an article that contains a clear description of Galois' Galois theory?
I am looking for article that includes the Notations of during Galois' life (permutations-> today 'arrangements', substitution-> today 'permutation', function of-> should be read as '...
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