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1500 questions
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A book on Emmy Noether's life
I am looking for a good book on Noether's life. Not only a biography, but a book that also explains her life's work to a general, somewhat mathematically mature audience. If such a book is not available, then a book aimed at graduate students would…
The very fluffy Panda
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6
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1 answer
Hevelius-Hooke dispute
Johannes Hevelius of Danzig (1611-1687) was the most famous astronomer of his time, and also
the last famous astronomer who did not use telescope. Most books on the history of astronomy
(and even the Wikipedia article on Hevelius) mention a dispute…
Alexandre Eremenko
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6
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Earliest depictions of the infinite
What are some of the earliest graphics (drawings/carvings/etc.) clearly attempting to depict some concept of the infinite (infinite divisibility or embeddings, infinite extension, infinite number)?
What are some of the earliest depictions of a line…
Tom Copeland
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Who was the first person to use physics to suggest that both the Sun and the Earth move?
I imagine it to be Isaac Newton, who brought the discussion of "force" rather than "center" into the modeling of orbits. I imagine that prior to Newton's forces, one had to be either a geocentrist or a heliocentrist.
Jonathan Dunn
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6
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1 answer
Who created Agile programming and why?
I semi-recently went to work for a workplace that employs Agile development instead of Waterfall. I have my own reasons for appreciating it, but who was the original creator of Agile? What problems were they hoping to solve with it?
Carlos Bribiescas
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6
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Use of $h$ in the Newton Quotient
Why do we typically use $h$ for
$$\frac{\mathrm{d}f}{\mathrm{d}x}=\lim_{h\to0}\frac{f(x+h)-f(x)}{h}$$
A student asked me this the other day. My guess was that it was originally height, because Newton was originally applying it to gravity and he was…
charlotte
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6
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Did Schiaparelli comment on the martian canals debate?
It s well known that in 1888, Italian Giovanni Schiaparelli announced finding a network of narrow lines on Mars, which he described as "canali," which a lot of English speakers including American Astronomer Percival Lowell took to mean "canals" and…
Colin McLarty
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6
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First use of Bernoulli's inequality and its name
The Wikipedia article “Bernoulli's inequality” says, that this inequality is called after the mathematician Jacob Bernoulli. Was he the first one using the inequality? Why is this inequality named after him? When was the inequality used first?
On…
Stephan Kulla
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What year was Euler's paper on the Konigsberg bridge problem first published?
All the sources I've read say that Leonhard Euler presented his paper on the Konigsberg bridge problem to the St. Petersburg Academy on August 26, 1735.
However, they don't seem to agree on what year the paper was first published in journal…
JRN
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Modern critiques of, alternatives to Kuhn's paradigm shifts?
Kuhn's theory of paradigm shifts dates back over 50 years. Are there modern critiques of or alternatives to his theory? It seems to have been controversial from the start, with some people apparently claiming that Kuhn was attacking scientific…
user466
6
votes
0 answers
Motivation behind Euler Theorem in differential geometry
I am teaching a class on elementary differential geometry and I would like to know, for myself and for my students, something more about the history of Euler Theorem and Euler equation: the curvature of a normal section is determined by the…
Giuseppe
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6
votes
4 answers
First use of zero as a number
The first know use of $0$ as it's own number was in India, but what was the equation in which it was used? Also, what was the tablet/scroll/whatever about?
tox123
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How come there is no portrait of Legendre?
Besides the famous cartoon, of course, there seems to be no portrait of Legendre. Legendre is well regarded nowadays and he was also quite influential at his time, for example, Jacobi and Abel praised him. Furthermore, he came from a wealthy family.…
Croqueta
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6
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5 answers
Why was the development of mathematics very slow between Ancient Greece and Descartes?
I asked this question on MSE here
In my studies of mathematics (I am not very good at mathematics, I only studied real analysis, some linear algebra, geometry and calculus ), I noticed that mathematics can be divided into two major parts. One part…
pie
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What was the role of Schmidt in derivation of the Gram-Schmidt process?
When reading the section related to Gram-Schmidt process in the book Linear Algebra and Its Applications by Gilbert Strang, I found a foot note that says:
If Gram thought of it first, what was left for Schmidt.
Other books taught me that the two…
Tran Khanh
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