Newest Questions
4,986 questions
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Did Galileo know about logarithms?
In his expository article/ booklet "The logarithm and the exponent" (Russian: А. Шень, "Логарифм и экспонента", 2 изд., М.:МЦНМО, 2013) Alexandr Shen' introduces the notion of ...
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Did Grothendieck know of higher categories before others developed infinity categories?
I understand that he developed an interest in them. He wrote about a homotopy hypothesis.
Did he know about higher categories before others developed it?
I believe he knew about categories since his ...
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Who proved that $\mathrm{SO}(3)$ is simple?
Who gave the first proof of the fact that $\mathrm{SO}(3)=\mathrm{SO}_3(\mathbb{R})$ is a simple abstract group, i.e. that every normal subgroup is trivial or the whole group?
I know a proof of van ...
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How Grothendieck rediscovered Lebesgue's theory?
I read Alexander Grothendieck's biography, "Country mouse, city mouse: 1947-1949". If you read this content, you can see this paragraph.
I even managed to fail an exam at the end of my ...
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Who was U. Uhlhorn, who first gave the correct proof of Wigner's theorem?
His widely referred paper with the proof is "Representation of symmetry transformations in quantum mechanics", Arkiv för Fysik 23 (30), 307-340, 1962.
His another important paper is "On ...
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Why the word "equinox"?
Many European languages have a word derived from the Latinism "equinox". It is a semantically transparent word: "equal" and "night". But other European languages use a ...
- 2,590
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First mention of the Chevalley constructibility theorem
Chevalley's theorem on constructible sets is a relatively well-known and, in a sense, elementary result in algebraic geometry. It appears in Grothendieck's EGA, which does not cite any further sources ...
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When did Faraday send this letter to Maxwell?
Faraday wrote the following in a letter to Maxwell:
I recieved your paper, and thank you very much for it. I do not venture to thank you for what you have said about "Lines of Force", ...
- 3,950
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When was the Sun first used as a temporal marker for the zodiac constellations?
When and where did humans start to use the Sun as a temporal marker for the zodiac constellations ?
I.e. which was the first civilization to do so ?
According to Wikipedia, ancient Babylonians ...
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What are the origins of the symbols used to denote levels of the arithmetic hierarchy?
The arithmetic hierarchy is a method of classifying the complexity of problems by treating such problems as logical formulas and organizing them according to the quantifiers they contain. There are ...
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"Convex" and "concave" are used in conflicting ways. What is their origin?
The terms convex and concave are used in conflicting ways in contemporary math:
$y = x^2$ is called convex and concave up
$y = -x^2$ is called concave and concave down
$y = \sin x$ is called neither ...
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Iwasawa writing on Iwasawa-Tate theory
Iwasawa worked out “Tate’s thesis” (harmonic analysis on adeles and ideles to get the analytic continuation and functional equation of Hecke $L$-functions) simultaneously and independently from Tate. ...
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Did Isaac Newton use bookplate or signatures in his library books?
Isaac Newton had huge library, almost 2000 books.
This source write about book that maybe Newton own in his library. This book doesn't have his bookplate, so it is not 100% that he was owner.
Do we ...
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Original quote about manifold
According to the article, "To What End Do We Study Riemann’s Investigation of Abelian Functions?", Riemann said the following about the Abelian function and the manifold:
there are in ...
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What is the most likely candidate for Galois' théorie de l’ambiguïté? [closed]
Although perhaps Galois' most original mathematical achievement, the
théorie de l’ambiguïté is so vaguely described in his letters that
nobody knows exactly what it is.
But what is the most likely ...
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