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1500 questions
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Are there theorems that have been truly lost?
Related:
Are there any theorems that become "lost" and discarded over time?
Is there a 'lost calculus'?
The questions above use the term 'lost' to refer to theorems that exist in the literature, but may be so obscure and/or not commonly useful…
Robert Columbia
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Have numbering systems other than base ten ever been used or popular?
Base ten makes a lot of sense as a numbering system, given the number of digits humans typically have on their hands.
That said, some older money systems weren't based on the number of fingers we have, e.g. pounds, shillings, and pence. Similarly,…
StackExchange What The Heck
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Cauchy's undead theory
A well known urban legend states that Cauchy's last words to the Academy where:
C'est ce que j'expliquerai plus au long dans un prochain mémoire. ("I will explain it in greater detail in my next memoire.")
I've always wondered, never managing to…
VicAche
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14
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Notation for Christoffel symbols
In Christoffel's 1869 paper in which he introduced the Christoffel symbols on the 3rd and 4th pages, they are written as $\left[\substack{ij \\ k}\right]$ and $\{\substack{ij \\ k}\}$. The notation $\Gamma_{kij}$ and $\Gamma_{ij}^k$ that is used…
KCd
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3 Poles and 3 Texans who had read "Principia Mathematica"
To quote Bertrand Russell, "My Philosophical Development", Simon and Schuster, N.Y., 1959,
p. 86:
I used to know of only six people who had read the later parts of the book
[Principia Mathematica]. Three of these were Poles .... The other three…
Pasha Zusmanovich
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14
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Has science fiction ever caused scientists to do real research?
Has science fiction ever caused scientists to do real research?
Science fiction here means fiction that tries to explain things in the world rather than speculate about the future or unexplorable past (e.g. aliens having travelled to Earth 100…
rus9384
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What famous laws were named by their discoverer
A question posed on academia.SE prompts this follow-up question:
Is there an example of a famous physical law, constant, equation, theorem etc that was named after its discoverer by the discoverer him/herself?
Thinking of things like Newton's Laws,…
Floris
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14
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2 answers
Why was China slow to recognise the sphericity of Earth?
Wikipedia notes that, while knowledge Earth is approximately spherical was obtained in ancient Greece, and became standard among educated people in Europe and the Middle East long before 1300 AD, China persisted in the flat-Earth model until a…
J.G.
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Which school of philosophy motivated thinking about spaces of higher dimension?
I'm trying to make a link between important mathematical breakthroughs in history and the important philosophical schools at the time. I realize that this topic is awfully broad and could be the subject of an entire book, so to simplify it a little…
hjhjhj57
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14
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When did people start accepting $\mathbf{R}^{2}$ as "the plane"?
The standard presentation of "coordinatizing the plane" in 19th century British textbooks on geometry (Salmon, Smith, Besant, and many more) take the plane as being rigorously (at the time) axiomatized by Euclid's axioms, and establishing a…
Maxis Jaisi
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14
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4 answers
What was Einstein's motivation for relativity theory?
I'm a high school student who never studied any relativity before, but I'm just wondering what was the question that Einstein asked himself before going into this field. I knew he has done lots of work such as Brownian motion, photoelectric…
user40003
14
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1 answer
How was the resemblance between apes and humans explained in pre-Darwinian biology?
How was the resemblance between apes and humans explained in pre-Darwinian biology? Who was the first biologist to note the resemblance?
Geremia
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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 is quoted in Wikipedia. Google shows over 400…
Franz Kurz
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14
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Why did Einstein help in the development of the Quantum theory if he didn't agree with it?
I read the book "A Brief History of Time" By Stephan Hawking. It states that Einstein helped scientists like Pauli etc. in the development of the quantum theory and even shared the Nobel Prize with them for his contributions, but to his dying day,…
user3459110
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Who invented the divisibility symbol and why is it backwards?
When we want to perform division, we write e.g. $8/2$ (this is what we already learn at school). But when we want to express that $2$ is a divisor of $8$, we write: $2\mid 8$. What the heck?? I do find this very counterintuitive, I would have…
SearchSpace
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