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1500 questions
16
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2 answers
What is the origin of "an algebra" as in vector space with multiplication?
What is the origin of calling a vector space over a field $F$ endowed with multiplication an algebra? Tried searching, but not surprisingly Google likes to drop the article and just bring me to the etymology of algebra sans article. Thanks.
AJY
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Is Kline right that Cauchy believed that continuous functions must be differentiable?
Morris Kline, in Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Time, writes in chapter 40 (The Installation of Rigor in Analysis), "Though Bolzano and Cauchy had rigorized (somewhat) the notions of continuity and the derivative, Cauchy and nearly all…
Mikhail Katz
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16
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When and why were mathematics and magic considered synonymous in England
In 1555, John Dee was arrested for "calculating". According to his MacTutor biography:
At this time mathematics in England was considered to be equivalent to the possession of magical powers and Aubrey writes that the authorities had "... burned…
TooTone
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16
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1 answer
When and how was ionizing radiation found to be harmful?
The discoverers of radioactivity and its potential uses are renowned, e.g. Madame Curie and Roentgen.
When was it discovered that human exposure to ionizing radiation including radioactive isotopes often caused leukemia, other cancers and highly…
Ellie Kesselman
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16
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2 answers
What is the origin of polynomials and notation for them?
This may be quite a broad question, but lately I've been wondering about the history behind polynomials. Nowadays these are pretty much the simplest kind of functions to work with, but I'd like to know how this came to be.
I'd also like to know who…
hjhjhj57
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16
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1 answer
Why was asthma considered a psychosomatic condition during the first half of the 20th century?
Asthma has been known since Ancient Egypt, according to the Medical News Today web-article Asthma History - Through The Ages, with the first use of the word by Hippocrates in Ancient Greece. Throughout most of history from Ancient Egypt and Greece,…
user22
16
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1 answer
How did ancient Egyptians become aware of the analgesic and anti-inflammatory properties of cold?
Cooper, S. M., and R. P. R. Dawber. "The history of cryosurgery." Journal of the royal society of medicine 94.4 (2001): 196-201. claims:
The benefits of cold have been appreciated for many thousands of
years. The ancient Egyptians, and later…
Franck Dernoncourt
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16
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1 answer
Did Dedekind show any evidence of pictorial geometric sense?
The most pictorial geometric thinking I find in Dedekind is the intuitive-geometric idea of a continuum which he criticizes as too vague before he gives his account of the continuum based on cuts.
In sharp contrast to Riemann, who Dedekind…
Colin McLarty
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16
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3 answers
Why did Norbert Wiener break off relations with Walter Pitts?
I read on the Wikipedia page on Walter Pitts that Norbert Wiener broke off relations with Walter Pitts, which "sent Walter Pitts into 'cognitive suicide'".
Why did Norbert Wiener break off relations with Walter Pitts? The Wikipedia page argues…
Franck Dernoncourt
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16
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10 answers
Works of scientists, philosophers and mathematicians that (re)surfaced after a long time
Sometimes, for one reason or the other, the works of scholars get lost. In some cases, they're lost forever. This happened to many books during the fire of the library of Alexandria, for instance.
Luckily, it can also happen that these works…
Max Muller
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16
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1 answer
Autistic Assistant of Gauss used to check Primality
The Arora-Barak book on complexity contains the following sentence with the following footnote, page 128:
In primality testing, we are given an integer N and wish to determine
whether or not it is prime. Algorithms for primality testing were
sought…
abrahimladha
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16
votes
2 answers
Did ancient Greek mathematicians consider numbers independently of geometry?
I am currently reading Oliver Bryne's edition of Euclid's Elements, and in The Elements many arithmetic propositions are proved geometrically, and it feels to me that numbers are always treated as something that is tied to a geometrical object (be…
Thomas.M
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16
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2 answers
What happened to cybernetics?
Recently, I've been looking into the life of the brilliant Norbert Wiener and the field he spawned, cybernetics. Before reading into it, I thought "cybernetics" was a pseudo-science-new-wave-steam-punk-post-human-cyborg-thing, so I was surprised to…
Jesse
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16
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7 answers
Mathematical results that became known long after their authors passed away
Liouville published Galois' work a decade after the death of this singular mathematician. Are there other cases of results being rescued by the mathematical community long after their authors were gone? Please include results whose importance went…
Leandro Caniglia
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15
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1 answer
Is the anecdote about Niels Bohr keeping a horseshoe on his door true?
I recently came to know of an anecdote about Niels Bohr that the philosopher Slavoj Zizek claims to have read in a biography of Bohr. He doesn't specify the author or the biography.
The anecdote goes as follows: Bohr used to keep a horseshoe on the…
ACat
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