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Does Galileo's method of tracing a parabola actually work?
In Two New Sciences, Galileo writes:
I take a perfectly round brass ball about the size of a walnut and project it along the surface of a metallic mirror held in a nearly upright position, so that the ball in its motion will press slightly upon the…
concertpi
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When Indian mathematicians learn of Euclid's Elements?
Transfer of mathematical knowledge from India to Europe (such as a positional number system with zero) allowed Europeans to develop arithmetic. But was there also a reverse direction (probably via Arab mathematicians) in which knowledge was…
Widawensen
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6
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Where did Ptolemy compare the Earth to the distance of fixed stars?
I read the following in C. S. Lewis, Miracles (page 77-8)
The immensity of the universe is not a recent discovery. More than seventeen hundred years ago Ptolemy taught that in relation to the distance of the fixed stars the whole Earth must be…
Frank Hubeny
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6
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The minimax theorem from 1928 to 1956
Minimax theorems are beautiful saddle-point results regarding conditions on a function $f$ under which $\max_x \min_y f(x,y) = \min_y \max_x f(x,y)$. In the common "normal form" game case, $x$ and $y$ are probability distributions corresponding to…
usul
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6
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What calculation did Halley or anyone else do to estimate the effects of Jupiter and Saturn on Halley's comet's return in 1758/9?
This answer to the question First observation that the movement of a planet or asteroid in its orbit was affected by another planet says:
In 1705, with the mathematical assistance of Issac Newton, Edmond Halley published Synopsis of the Astronomy…
uhoh
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6
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What is the earliest instance of the use of an algorithm to solve problems?
In reading a description on Usenet of a NIST competition for selecting a standard cipher, I read:
Consider that the best currently known methods for factoring use
randomization: Construct enough cases at random, and eventually you can
paste…
forest
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6
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Who developed The Fundamental Theorem of Curves?
In any modern differential geometry textbook (Do Carmo, for example), the fundamental theorem of curves can be found. It states that:
every regular curve in three-dimensional space, with non-zero
curvature, has its shape (and size) completely…
Chandler
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6
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2 answers
Why didn't John von Neumann win the Turing Award, Fields Medal or Nobel Prize?
From what I've read in Wikipedia, John von Neumann made a stupendous number of contributions to economics, computer science and mathematics. Why, then, didn't he receive a top award in any of these disciplines?
Siddhartha
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6
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Why does the US keep survey miles and feet?
The United States adopted the international mile and foot in 1959, but for some reason they decided to keep alongside the older units as survey mile and survey foot. These units are almost equal to the first two, but "almost" means "problem" when it…
Ratman
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Earliest Instances of a Slope/Direction Field for a First-Order ODE
Background
When first encountering slope fields in calculus or elementary differential equations, students often ask "What is the purpose?"
A concise answer is that slope fields provide a way to graphically represent a first-order ODE of the form y'…
Greg Stanton
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6
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Did the author of Alice in Wonderland make any substantial original discoveries in mathematics?
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name of Lewis Carroll, was a mathematics lecturer at Oxford University and today is primarily famous for his fanciful stories laced with mathematical and logical jokes. He also seems to have been a…
Robert Columbia
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6
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Where does the term elasticity (of a function) come from?
Elasticity of a function is a mathematical concept that is widely used in economics. In particular, price elasticity of demand or supply. But generally elasticity in economics is the measurement of how an economic variable responds to a change in…
gagarine
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6
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How did Newton and Leibniz interpret the integral?
How did Newton and Leibniz think about the integral? Did they only see it as an anti-derivative or did they also think of it as the area under a curve?
user109871
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Did Einstein want to reduce general relativity to elementary mathematics?
In this recent article, the authors write
Consequently, it is a desideratum to teach general relativity in a way
that is based on elementary mathematics only. This objective, already
stated by Einstein in 1916 (Einstein 1916), has been pursued…
Doubt
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6
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How did the modern understanding of Galois theory come about?
The "modern" understanding of the Galois group of a polynomial is as automorphisms of the splitting field of the polynomial which keep the base field fixed. These concepts were unknown to Galois, who thought about permutations of roots and…
Nat Kuhn
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