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What is Heaviside's version of Maxwell's equations?
I have read, in many places, statements like this:
Heaviside was able to greatly simplify Maxwell's 20 equations in 20
variables, replacing them by four equations in two variables. Today we
call these 'Maxwell's equations' forgetting that they…
Harry Weston
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How did Mersenne discover Mersenne primes?
So, I was wondering, how did Mersenne come up with the formulae $2^p-1$? Do we have any ideas of how it came to be?
copper
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Viète's Relevance and his Connection to Euler
Viète's equations are used in some proofs of the Basel problem, which was allegedly solved by Euler.
Viète's equations include the following: given a polynomial,
$$a_0 + a_1x+a_2x^2 + ... + a_nx^n$$ with roots $\alpha_1,…
Antoni Parellada
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What 19th century developments contributed to the General theory of Relativity?
Regarding General Theory of Relativity, I'm interested to find out whether there are some contributors to this theory in 19th century or not. In fact I want to know whether there are some physicists before Einstein who had approached even…
Hamid Enki
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8
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Why is calculus missing from Newton's Principia?
I'm not suggesting that Newton did not discover calculus - the question is written this way to express my surprise that the Principia does not use the methods of calculus (or 'fluxions'). He instead uses plane and conic geometry; and of course the…
Mozibur Ullah
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History of Coagulation of Milk by Short Waves
In 1968 NASA, through the assistance of the Israel Program for Scientific Translation, translated from Russian the 1964 book "The Earth in the Universe", with chapters written by top Soviet scientists.
In a chapter written by Prof. A. L.…
DavePhD
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Where does Markov operator come from?
I found this definition of "Markov operator" in the book Chaos, Fractals, and Noise by Lasota and Mackey.
Denote by $L^1(\mu)$ the space of Lebesgue integrable functions according to the measure $\mu$. Then, an operator $$ P: L^1(\mu) \to L^1(\mu)$$…
Adam
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8
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First papers on holomorphic functions
Briot and/or Cauchy are often said to have written the first papers on holomorphic functions, explicitly discussing them as such and their special properties.
Which papers are these? When and where were these published?
Gottfried William
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How and when was it realized that ophiolites represented pieces of ocean crust?
Ophiolites are distinctive sequences of rock, typically capped by sediments followed by basic rocks (pillow lavas, sheeted dykes, and gabbro) followed by ultramafics (eg. dunite).
Although the exact emplacement process has evolved over time, these…
winwaed
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Who discovered the duality between platonic solids?
As it is well known, every platonic solid has a dual (obtained by interchanging vertices and faces), which also happens to be a platonic solid. I would like to know who was the first person to discover this, or in which period it probably happened.…
hjhjhj57
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8
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1 answer
Why did Laplace invent the Laplace transform?
Why did Laplace invent the Laplace transform? What was the context? Was it before Fourier or after?
wdlang
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8
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3 answers
Scientists with exceptionally good or bad memory
I'd like to know about examples of prominent scientists having exceptionally good memory, with anecdotes if possible, and how it affected their work. It would also be interesting to see examples of the complete opposite, prominent scientists having…
hjhjhj57
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8
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Was the Riemann Integral the first integration theory?
My sketchy understanding of the (no doubt long) history of integration theory is that the first integration theory was created by Riemann as part of his work on trigonometric series ("Über die Darstellbarkeit einer Function durch eine…
Faheem Mitha
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8
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1 answer
Who invented the mole?
Who invented, or first used, the concept of the mole? I did my own research and the closest I came was Avogadro’s constant, which was made not by Avogadro but rather by Jean Baptiste Perrin. However, I am still not sure of who invented it. I cannot…
tox123
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What was the aftermath of the proof of irrationality of $\sqrt 2$ for the Greeks?
We all know that the idea of irrational numbers was very much anathema to the Pythagorean school of mathematics, and that its revelation caused quite a stir. But ultimately, after the dust had settled, the Pythagoreans had to accept the proof and…
silvascientist
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