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What were 12 year old Pitts' objections to Principia Mathematica?
In Wikipedia on the page dedicated to Walter Pitts (accesses today), it is written that,
He is widely remembered to have spent three days in a library, at the age of 12, reading Principia Mathematica and sent a letter to Bertrand Russell pointing…
user459
13
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When was the cogwheel gear invented?
Can someone tell me what year was the cogwheel gear invented? I tried searching it up but the answers were too complicated.
user573
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Who coined the term "iff" for "if and only if"?
The OED's entry for "iff" lists this as the earliest usage:
1955 J. L. Kelley Gen. Topol. vii. 232: "F is equicontinuous at x iff there is a neighborhood of x whose image under every member of F is small."
Is there an earlier usage?
Geremia
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Why did Einstein stop publishing so many papers in Annalen der Physik?
In his early years (actually, straight through the early 1910s), Albert Einstein published a lot of papers in Annalen der Phyisk, a very old and prominent German scientific journal. However, this trend stopped around 1912-ish, and throughout the…
HDE 226868
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Einstein's confusion about Stern-Gerlach
In a historical description of the Stern-Gerlach experiment, [Friedrich 2003] says:
Einstein and Paul Ehrenfest, among others, struggled to understand how the atomic magnets could take up definite, preordained orientations in the field. Because the…
user466
13
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4 answers
Origin of the concept of dimension?
When and how did the concept of dimension first emerge — the realisation that there is some “3-ness” about the world we live in, an analogous “2-ness” about the surface of a table, and “1-ness” about a line?
Certainly it must have become clear once…
Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine
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Four temperaments and medical methodology
One of the traditional ideas about personality was Temperament Theory which probably originated from Egypt and was developed by Hippocrates into a medical theory. In the tenth century, it was extended by Avicenna and had been used for many years in…
MEDVIS
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When and why did powers come to be called 'exponents'?
(This question was first asked here. I modified it and moved it here based on some suggestions.)
I have some difficulty in understanding the complex exponential function. So I decide to review the good old exponent function which I learned long…
smwikipedia
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What major areas of mathematics have been abandoned?
It seems that the focus of mathematical research moves on every so often, and some areas are not proven wrong, but have just become uninteresting in the current mathematical culture. I was under the impression that solutions to quartic (and high…
mboss
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What is the origin of the Collatz conjecture?
When was the $3x+1$ problem first proposed?
At Wikipedia, I found the following statement (without citation):
The Collatz conjecture is a conjecture in mathematics named after Lothar Collatz, who first proposed it in 1937.
There is the following…
Adam
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How did Planck derive the black body radiation formula without using the Bose statistics?
It is so funny that science never develops as in the textbooks. Bose only introduced his statistics in 1924, so Planck could not possibly have used it to derive the radiation formula in 1900. So how did he do it? Also, are there any translations of…
John
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When was the modern field theory approach to Galois theory developed?
It is well known that Galois, and other mathematicians around that time, considered Galois groups to be permutation groups and approached Galois theory in this manner. At some point the theory took a different angle and it was approached using newly…
Ali Caglayan
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Etymology of "power" (math.)
Having done some searches on the internet, seems like the term "power" is a mistranslation. The Wikipedia article links to an article in the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive where it is written
The notation and terminology for powers and…
მამუკა ჯიბლაძე
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When did the people start using the portraits of the two Euclids interchangeably?
According to the folks of Wikipedia, this is the portrait of Euclid of Alexandria (the "Father of Geometry"):
Yet, I read several years ago on MathOverflow that the individual in the picture is actually a namesake of Euclid of Alexandria who was…
José Hdz. Stgo.
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How did prisoners of war discover scientific breakthroughs while interned?
Reading the excellent thread What are some scientific breakthroughs that have been done during jail time?, it stands to reason to ask what are some scientific breakthroughs made by interned prisoners of war, when the author was confined in a POW…
user22