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1500 questions
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Who discovered that different objects accelerate at the same rate due to gravity?
The concept of the constant acceleration for different objects due to gravity (at the same height and ignoring atmospheric effects) is usually attributed to Galileo. In reality, Galileo merely popularized the concept with his Tower of Pisa Thought…
winwaed
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What were the obstacles that made the discovery of calculus very late?
I wonder What were the obstacles that made the discovery of calculus very late ?
Why the discovery of calculus took so long? I know that some of the ideas and techniques of calculus appeared in ancient Greece, but they were not developed into a…
pie
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When did "neighbourhood of a point" first appear in the history of Taylor series?
I am trying to track down at what point mathematicians started to use the terminology of expanding a function "around a point" or in the "neighbourhood of a point". Neither Taylor nor Maclaurin would appear to use such terminology, and while I would…
StormyTeacup
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DeMorgan's commentary on Euclid's Elements
Augustus DeMorgan wrote comments on Euclid's Elements, which capture many of the most important points. Heath quotes them extensively.
I cannot find any source for the original: Where can I see DeMorgan's comments in the original?
SRobertJames
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Who first considered signed area?
Who first suggested that the area enclosed by a closed path and the area enclosed by that same path traversed in reverse could be regarded as equal in magnitude but opposite in sign?
Cauchy must have noticed this in connection with contour…
James Propp
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How did the concept of pH originate and develop?
Background & My research
To begin I did some research to find a few articles on the history of pH namely "The Symbol for pH"- William B. Jensen, "One-Hundred Years of pH" - Rollie J. Myers (but couldn't access it) and "The origin and the meaning of…
Bhavya Jain
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What research articles were inspired by web comics?
Currently, I'm doing a PhD on the applications of algorithms to generate timelines of textual content. Recently, I found an article entitled StoryFlow: Tracking the Evolution of Stories by S. Liu et al. (2013), which can be found over here.
The…
Max Muller
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How were sailing warships maneuvered in battle -- who coordinated the actions of all the sailors?
I have wondered if the apparently complex arrangement of the sails of early 19th century vessels was reflective of a lack of understanding of the optimal arrangement of such sails (since modern sailing yachts lack so many sails) or if indeed for…
releseabe
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First to realize that seasons were reversed above and below the equator?
I assume this conclusion was hard to make empirically in the days of slow travel -- one could not as we can today fly from above the equator to below it and observe the difference in weather and even if one could, it would be hard to attribute this…
releseabe
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Who were some physicists with musical background?
Inspired on this post: Who were some mathematicians who have a musical background? I want to now ask if there were any famous physicists who had a particular musical background.
Looking in Google I just got modern names like Brian Cox or Brian May…
Mauricio
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Adrastus, Proclus, and 2+8+50+288+… versus 1+9+49+289+…
According to the MacTutor essay "D'Arcy Thompson on Greek irrationals" (which I take to be a version of Thompson's original essay whose only liberty with the original text is giving English translations where Thompson gives Greek words and phrases),…
James Propp
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8
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Banach chicken story
I think in undergrad functional analysis we were told an anecdote that at Stefan Banach's university in Warsaw they maintained a list of open problems which had material prizes attached to them including chickens. But I can't find anything on that…
user313032
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Why did Borel reject countable additivity of probability?
On page 26 of the 2003 article - The origins and legacy of Kolmogorov's
Grundbegriffe by Shafer and Vovk, it is stated that Borel rejected the countable additivity axiom of probability theory as he felt that a countable infinity of zero…
Bruce
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8
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Why did Columbus think the Earth was much smaller than it is?
Columbus set off on his westward journey to Asia, believing the Earth was much smaller than it is.
There was some apparent disagreement about the size, and Columbus was staking his life on it. Why didn't he make his own estimate, for example as…
MWB
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8
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Was a mathematical connection involved when introducing "graph" of a function and "graph" in graph theory?
A colleague and I were having a discussion about mathematical similarities between graphs of functions and graphs as used in graph theory: Simple graphs can be defined in terms of pair (of vertices), just as we can think of the graph a function $f$…
Steve Costenoble
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