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1500 questions
6
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What is Peirce doing in this pre-Chi-squared example?
In 1878, C. S. Peirce performed a calculation that (I think) would be better done using chi-squared testing — but Pearson hasn’t introduced that yet.
What exactly is Peirce doing here in the last sentence? Is it valid? almost valid? (When I did a…
JPM
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6
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How influential was the Kerala school to European development in Calculus?
Did it influence the work of Newton or Leibniz, i have often heard that Europeans "stole" calculus from the Kerala school, these are views often parroted by Indian nationalists, but how accurate is it?
user4281
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6
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How was the Antikythera Mechanism moved?
I understood all the gears and cogwheels in the Antikythera Machine, but I am not sure what make all these stuffs works inside the box.
Is it mechanical movement done in hand-wound style?
Max
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6
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Who first described the fundamental group as the group of deck transformations?
Grothendieck developed the theory of the fundamental group of a scheme in SGA 1. In order to do so he used the fact that the fundamental group of a topological space is isomorphic to the group of deck transformations --- fiber permuting…
User0112358
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6
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What is history behind Smith-Volterra-Cantor sets?
Looking at Wikipedia, I see that fat Cantor sets are also called Smith-Volterra-Cantor sets. Another name which is sometimes associated with these sets is Hermann Hankel.
I suppose that Cantor's name appears there simply because this construction is…
Martin
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6
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2 answers
Who coined the term "uniform" as in "uniform distribution"?
During the late 16th century and early 17th century, published work about probability theory (e.g. Liber de ludo aleae by J. Cardan published in 1663 but writen around 1564) studied dice games using equiprobability on a finite sample…
Julien__
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6
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2 answers
When did set theory throw off theology?
"The general set theory [...] definitely belongs to metaphysics. You can easily convince yourself when examining the categories of cardinal numbers and the order type, these basic notions of set theory, on the degree of their generality.
[...]…
Franz Kurz
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6
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1 answer
Notation for fiber bundles - why E for total space?
I'm looking for info on why E is commonly used for the total space of a fiber bundle. I understand F (fiber) and B (base), but there doesn't seem to be any particularly obvious reason for choosing E.
octocat
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6
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1 answer
Do astronomers still use decimal time?
Wikipedia states that decimal time - where the time of the day is expressed as a decimal part of the day - "have been used by astronomers ever since [Laplace introduced them]". An example by Herschel is also shown.
Does anybody know if the use is…
mau
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6
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2 answers
When it was discovered that cubic equations always have roots?
Every cubic equation (with real coefficients) has a real root. Who was the first person who proved this? Is it already contained in Bombelli's Algebra?
José Carlos Santos
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6
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How was the focus/directrix property of conic sections discovered?
I've always thought that defining conic sections by a locus of points w.r.t the ratio of the distance to the focus and directrix was always "too artificial" - how does one actually discover this mysterious directrix, a line that isn't really lying…
PhD
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Why didn't Euclid's Elements treat conic sections?
There's a well known treatise by Apollonius on conic sections, but these objects are absent in Euclid's Elements. Why? If I were to guess, I'd say that conic sections cannot be constructed using a compass and a straightedge, but I cannot be sure.
Maxis Jaisi
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6
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4 answers
Is there a formal distinction between potential and actual infinities?
In modern set theory the difference between actual infinity and potential infinity is often not understood or even denied. Some decades back however mathematicians like Hilbert or Poincaré, let alone Cantor or Fraenkel were fully aware of the…
Franz Kurz
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6
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1 answer
First appearance of tensor product symbol $\otimes$
I was asked recently if the tensor product symbol $\otimes$ had been used before Bourbaki's publication on multilinear algebra in 1948 (a draft of this document can be seen at http://sites.mathdoc.fr/archives-bourbaki/PDF/040_iecnr_049.pdf starting…
KCd
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6
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Has Euclid stated Cauchy's theorem?
Cauchy's Rigidity theorem says that if the corresponding faces of two convex polytopes are isometric (congruent)
then the polytopes are related by a (proper or improper) motion.
Cauchy's biography (by Bruno Belhoste, Springer 1991) says that this…
Alexandre Eremenko
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