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1500 questions
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Who introduced random variables into probability?
I used to think that the answer is Kolmogorov. So the Shafer-Vovk's review of Kolmogorov's famous 1933 axiomatization of probability surprised me a bit:"Today, what Frechet and his contemporaries knew is no longer known. We know Kolmogorov and …
Conifold
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29
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Did physicists around 1900 really believe they were close to "figuring it all out"?
I've encountered the claim that around the end of the 19th century, physicists believed that their understanding of the physical world was close to being complete.
One example of this claim can be found in Wikipedia's article on History of physics…
Ofri Raviv
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How did Isaac Newton write the integral symbol?
Isaac Newton is known as the discoverer of the FTC (Fundamental Theorem of Calculus), so maybe he wrote the integral symbol and derivative symbol. I know he wrote the derivative symbol as $\dot y$ but I cannot find the integral symbol he wrote. How…
MIKANkankitsu
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How did Eratosthenes know the Sun was very far away?
Eratosthenes calculated the radius of the Earth from the difference of the lengths of shadows between Aswan and Alexandria were different (see also here). But this could also happen if the Earth were flat and the Sun wasn't really far away. A point…
Rohit Pandey
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29
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Why did no one else, except Einstein, work on developing General Relativity between 1905-1915?
Einstein dedicated his time between 1905-1915 to develop general relativity (GR). It seems strange to me that no other physicists attempted to tackle this problem in this ten-year period. After all, developing a relativistic theory of gravity…
Omar Nagib
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When and how was the geometric understanding of gauge theories developed?
In theoretical physics, the modern perspective on gauge theory is that it is most elegantly described in the 'language' of differential geometry. I am interested in the history behind these ideas.
Firstly, it appears (e.g. this anecdote by C.N.…
Danu
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In a popular anecdote, who took 20 minutes to decide that a thing was obvious?
The joke is found on this comment chain on Reddit. One user told the joke:
The version I heard is that Pauli was lecturing, and he said "this is obvious". A student raises his hand and says "sorry professor, I don't think that is obvious". Pauli…
Ooker
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Why did I learn to write the base of the logarithm differently from the rest of the world?
It only occurred to me recently, in connection with this MO posting, that the way I write the base of the logarithm is not shared by the rest of the world. I am Dutch, and I learned at school to write the base as a superscript, $^{a}\!\log b$,…
Carlo Beenakker
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The history of different constructions of tangent spaces
In Lee's book 'Introduction to Smooth Manifolds', there is an interesting discussion (near the end of chapter three) of several different ways of viewing/constructing the notion of a tangent space to a point on a manifold. As it turns out, there are…
Danu
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28
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Who attached Buniakovsky's name to the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality?
From time to time one sees insistence that the inequality name "Cauchy-Schwarz" should include Buniakovsky.
This is based on a paragraph in a note to the St Petersburg Academy from 1859, where Buniakovsky takes Cauchy's inequality to be well known…
zyx
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28
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Roman engineers
It is a common opinion that Romans did not contribute anything to exact sciences, but did contribute much to engineering. (How can it be otherwise, anyone who has been on the territory of the former empire could see all these marvelous buildings,…
Alexandre Eremenko
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28
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Contributions to chemistry from medieval Arabia
A lot of chemical terms such as alcohol, aldehyde, sugar/azucar, amalgam etc. are of Arabic origin.
Did Arabic chemistry in medieval times achieve any scientific insights still valid today (such as 'alcohol can be transformed into aldehyde by…
Felix
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When did physics texts start to teach Kepler's $3/2$'s power law as a result of Newton's $1/r^2$ law of gravitation, rather than the other way around?
In modern physics textbooks, we teach Newton's laws of motion, then Newton's law of Universal Gravitation, and then Kepler's laws of planetary motion. Specifically, from the $1/r^2$ form of the gravitational force, and some other parts of Newton's…
Colin McFaul
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Did Galileo's writings on infinity influence Cantor?
To what extent was Cantor motivated by Galileo's paradox? More generally, to what extent were late 19th century mathematicians motivated by, or even aware of, Galileo's paradox?
This is an issue I've been wondering about for many years but I have…
Dave L Renfro
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What attracted Einstein to the anomalous precession of Mercury?
The story is usually told starting with Einstein's 1915 paper Explanation of the Perihelion Motion of Mercury from General Relativity Theory, or at least its drafts from 1913-14. It was the first triumph of general relativity. But how did Einstein…
Conifold
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