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1500 questions
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Why are "join" and "meet" named as they are?
In the context of partially ordered sets, why are the words for supremum and infimum "join" and "meet"? I find the nomenclature puzzling, especially since the English words "join" and "meet" are synonyms, but denote opposite concepts when talking…
Theo Bendit
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9
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What triggered jesuits' ban on infinitesimals in 1632?
... since the very idea of infinitesimal was foreshadowed by Cavalieri ( "limit") in 1635, then put forward in an indirect way by John Wallis ($1/\infty$) in 1655, and then formalized by Newton ( "$o$" ) in 1666, and by Leibniz still a few years…
user157860
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How did Henry Cavendish deduce the inverse square law in electrostatics from his experiment in 1772?
An elegant experiment in 1772 by Henry Cavendish. Cavendish charged a spherical conducting shell that contained within it, and temporarily connected to it, a smaller sphere. The outer shell was then separated into two halves and carefully removed,…
Hawkingo
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How is the word kernel associated with distributions?
I am trying to rationalize the meaning of the term kernel, especially when it is associated with distributions. The English and German etymology all show that the literal meaning is corn (English) and grain (in German). For example the term Gaussian…
AChem
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What actually led Feynman to the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics?
It is commonly known that Feynman's path integral was inspired by Dirac's observation that the kernel is proportional to $\exp{iS/\hbar}$. It was Feynman, however, who had the idea of expressing the kernel as the integral of such an expression over…
seeker_after_truth
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Did Maxwell originally write his equations using quaternions?
I read somewhere, some time ago that Maxwell originally wrote his eponymous equations using the formalism of quaternions and it was only the later intervention of Gibbs and Heaviside that put them into the modern form, that is via vector analysis (I…
Mozibur Ullah
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What theories preceded the wave, particles and duality models of light?
Currently, the wave-particle duality model for light is the accepted model. From HyperPhysics:
The evidence for the description of light as waves was well established at the turn of the century when the photoelectric effect introduced firm evidence…
user22
9
votes
4 answers
How did early scientists know if a current was changing direction? (AC vs. DC)
How did Faraday, Ampere and Hippolyte Pixii know that electricity 'traveled' at all? Let alone in a certain direction? And that it was reversing direction with certain early generators?
Kurt Hikes
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When and by whom was the term 'momentum' introduced?
We know that up to 1726, when the third edition of the Principia was published, the name for $m\vec v$ was: quantitas motus.
Do you know who substituted that with another Latin word: 'momentum'?
user646
9
votes
2 answers
Quantitative measures of rise and decline of scientific fields over time (beyond number of publications)
I'm interested in the birth / death / life cycle of scientific fields over time, and looking for quantitative metrics that suggest whether a particular scientific field is in decline. A simple and common metric (from the field of bibliometrics) is…
herfa
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Did amateurs ever produce important proofs or similar?
Background
Mathematics and some areas of physics and computer science have the peculiar appeal that some problems and results are easy to understand and it is conceivable that somebody armed with nothing but the right idea can come up with something…
Wrzlprmft
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What are the modern connections of the Pentagramma Mirificum studied by Gauss?
In the last years, I read a lot about a mathematical object that was discovered by John Napier in 1620 and explored much more deeply by Gauss, who called this "Pentagramma Mirificum" (latin for "the miraculous pentagram"). Unfortunately, there is no…
user2554
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Failures in math
I would like to have help in producing examples of mathematicians that, in some sense I'll explain below,turned their career into failure. I am mainly interested in examples from XIX and XXth century.
I'd like to hear of mathematicians…
Nicola Ciccoli
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Help translate from German a quote by Hermann Weyl in Space Time Matter
I would like to find an accurate translation to the following quote from Space Time Matter:
Man muß gegen diese Orgien des Formalismus, mit dem man heute sogar die Techniker zu belästigen beginnt, nachdrücklich protestieren.
Google translate…
Wynne
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Was there an intentional purge of all audio recordings of Alan Turing?
The YouTube video Alan Turing's lost radio broadcast rerecorded contains a re-enactment of Alan Turing's lecture broadcast by the BBC.
In the introduction, the narrator (James Grimes, also of the Numberphile series of videos) states:
His lecture…
uhoh
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