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Historically, what led to the question of the validity of interchange of limit operations?
It seems G. H. Hardy once wrote that "The problem of deciding whether two given limit operations are commutative is one of the most important in mathematics". I was wondering what led to the need to formulate the question of when the limit…
A.D.
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What is the origin of the "Japanese bracket"?
In discussions of Sobolev spaces one often sees the Japanese bracket, $$\langle x \rangle = (1+|x|^2)^{1/2},$$ as useful shorthand.
I was not easily able to find information about this term.
(1) What was the first systematic usage of something like…
mme
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Why do I , J and K in mechanics represent X , Y and Z in maths?
Why are letters $i$, $j$, and $k$ used for axes names in mechanics while letters $x$ , $y$ and $z$ are used in mathematics?
Why these dimensions weren't called A, B and C or F, G and H?
Kiroloes Amir
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History of irreducible polynomials and motivation for them
I've been thinking about the history of the irreducible polynomials and why they were introduced. I found What is the origin of polynomials and notation for them?, but it's about polynomials in general.
Could anyone please describe the historical…
Luana
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10
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Heisenberg's Obituary to Pauli
In an interview of Heisenberg by Thomas Kuhn:
When Pauli had died, I was asked to write this memorial volume. Weisskopf had asked me. Then, actually, originally I had written an article on Pauli's philosophical views, but this article was not…
Sha
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10
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Who was Heinrich Kornblum?
Heinrich Kornblum was a student of Edmund Landau who is known for his generalization of Dirichlet's theorem on primes in arithmetic progressions to function fields. He was born in Wolow, Poland in 1890, and he died in 1914 as a soldier in WWI at the…
CJ Dowd
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10
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What was Kolmogorov’s point of view in the philosophy of mathematics?
Today the standard interpretation of intuitionistic logic is the Brouwer-Heyting-Kolmogorov interpretation which was presented independently by Arend Heyting and Andrei Nikolajewitsch Kolmogorow. While Heyting was a student of Brouwer and an…
Christian
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Arithmetic calculation before the 17th Century
Apparently Dijkstra wrote in an article in Datamation1 in 1977:
It's very illuminating to think about the fact that some – at most four
hundred – years ago, professors at European universities would tell the
brilliant students that if they were…
Rob Arthan
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10
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1 answer
What is the first reference to a nondeterministic Turing machine?
I am looking for the first reference of a Nondeterministic Turing machine. There is no mention of them in the 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers."
vy32
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Who introduced the "dagger"symbol as conjugate transpose in quantum mechanics?
The $\dagger$ symbol is often used in quantum mechanics,and also often in general mathematics to represent the conjugate transpose operation.For Hermitian matrices we can write $$A^\dagger=A$$Who introduced this notation?
Manas Dogra
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10
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Notation from Weyl's algebraic number theory book
In Weyl's "Algebraic Theory of Numbers", which was written in 1940, there are many symbols that look handwritten, such as Fraktur (or Sütterlin, whatever you want to call it) letters for ideals. His symbol for the rational numbers looks to me like…
KCd
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Did Benjamin Franklin know calculus?
My sense is that Franklin was a scientist more like Faraday than Maxwell. Given also that Calculus was fairly new when Franklin was in school (and as far as I know, Benjamin Franklin did not get very far in school anyway) how likely was it that he…
releseabe
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Who was the first to weigh chemical reaction products?
It is said that Lavoisier and Lomonosov both discovered that the cumulated mass of reactants is conserved. My question is simple: who (and when) started weighing chemical products before and after forcing them react?
DanielC
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Was the take off of neural computing research in the 80's due to Japan?
Chow, Tommy WS, and John Sum. "Guest editorial: special issue on the emerging applications of neural networks." Neural Computing & Applications 20.7 (2011): 923-924. says:
The take off of neural computing research was probably due to the
…
Franck Dernoncourt
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9
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Who invented the gradient descent algorithm?
In connection to the question "Who invented the gradient?", I want to know who invented the gradient descent algorithm?
M.M
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