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Did Hooke's law come from experiments, or was it mathematically derived from Newtonian mechanics?
Was Hooke's law first coming from experiment or from math derivation of which Newtonian mechanical laws are the only prerequisite? Also can the law itself be reinvented in this way, or is it impossible to derive it mathematically from Newton's…
Victor
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History of summing integers with natural powers
In my 10th class school material, it is given that Aryabhatta discovered the following formulas:
$\sum n=\dfrac{n(n+1)}{2}$
$\sum n^2=\dfrac{n(n+1)(2n+1)}{6}$
$\sum n^3=\dfrac{n^2(n+1)^2}{4}$
Is he the first person to discover these formula? If…
hanugm
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Who discovered that the radius of the observable Universe is 46 billion ly?
I know that before the beginning of the 20th century it was thought that the Milky Way galaxy was the whole universe. Then there was the discovery of galaxy redshift, and the size of the Universe was considered to be much larger. But who was the…
set5
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Why did scientists think the orbit of Mars had the shape of a limaçon in the geocentric model?
While looking up the old Copernican model for orbits, I encountered the following image (courtesy Wikipedia):
This seems... weird. Not only would it be an odd thing to come up with or express in mathematics, it also doesn't make much sense…
user2285
6
votes
1 answer
English translation of Omar Khayyám's mathematical work
Is there any current English translation of the mathematical works of Omar Khayyám?
Loreno Heer
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6
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1 answer
Galois quote about his refused work
On page 10 of this article (in Portuguese), I read that Galois used the following phrase when his memoirs weren't accepted by the French Academy of Sciences:
Oh! Innocent cherubs!
Could someone give references or details on this quote?
Pedro
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6
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2 answers
How was the composition and structure of water determined?
Water is a pretty basic molecule that people used since early science. What were the steps in figuring out what water is made of and what is its structure?
Sparkler
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6
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Did Gauss formulate, or at least know of, the full essence of the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem?
I know that a special case of the Bonnet theorem, called the Theorema Elegantissimum, was proved by Gauss in his 1827 treatise on differential geometry. This was a theorem that dealt with the connection between total curvature and angular deficit,…
user2554
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3 answers
Books on the History of Physics
I've just finished reading Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar, which deals with the history of QM from Plank's quantisation for black body problem to Bell's inequality focusing especially on the…
Gonenc
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How did Newton establish the conservation laws in the Principia?
In the contemporary axiomatic description the conservation laws in mechanics are deduced from Noether's Theorem using the homogeneity and isotropy of space and time.
How did Newton, if he did, establish the conservation of linear momentum and energy…
Mozibur Ullah
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2 answers
Was Galileo a plagiarizer?
Was Galileo a plagiarizer?
If we where to apply to the works of Galileo the general standards of plagiarism that we conform to today at our local institutions, would he be considered a plagiarizer?
Take, for instance, the mean speed theorem. From…
Neil Meyer
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6
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1 answer
Since when do humans know about electric charge?
We know that the electron was discovered in 1897 by J.J. Thomson. So was the knowledge about charge, current, electricity and all those terms related to it which we study today discovered after it, or did we have that knowledge from early times?
Shubham Prateek
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6
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4 answers
What is the first historical reference to the binary search algorithm?
Most of you know what I mean, but I will define it broadly: the binary search algorithm consists in searching iteratively for an element within an ordered set, by asking yes/no questions that will exclude about half of the remaining elements each…
Eynar Oxartum
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Has a digit ever been used to represent the number "10"?
Ten is special to humans, as there are 10 fingers on two hands, and fingers are still the basic counting medium for people.
So, was there any digit representing the number "10" in a positional system historically used by any civilizations?
EDIT:
We…
Barun
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6
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2 answers
How did people react to the realization that Aristotle's ideas had gone without question for way too long?
Recently read the book "Gravity" by George Gamow, in which he says:
For centuries Aristotelian philosophy and scholasticism dominated human thought. Scientific questions were answered by dialectic arguments (i.e. by just talking), and no attempt…
davelook
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