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1500 questions
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Quotation about $\pi$ and the number of deaths
I read more than once a story which took place, if memory serves me well, in England, in the XIXth century. A statistician (or a mathematician) was making computations about life expectancy (or mortality rate). Those computations involved the normal…
José Carlos Santos
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What is the etymology of "phase space" of a dynamical system?
The state space of a dynamical system is often called a "phase space". What is the etymology of this?
(Note that I'm not asking about the history of the concept, but rather about the history of the term. How did it come about, in which language, and…
Kahovius
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Who first solved the classical harmonic oscillator?
There is a question Who solved the quantum harmonic oscillator?, but not one for the classical oscillator. Wikipedia's article Harmonic Oscillator does not have historical information either. So who first solved the classical harmonic oscillator…
Chetan Waghela
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6
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How did 19th century physicists do their undergraduate/graduate studies?
I have read that
In 1847, he became aware of physicist James Prescott Joule’s argument for the mutual convertibility of heat and mechanical work and for their mechanical equivalence.
We study these things (I mean the above said thing which is…
Knight wants Loong back
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6
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When was the first recorded occurence of irrational and imaginary number usage in number theory?
I saw a letter of Euler to Lagrange congratulating him on his usage of imaginary numbers in the "analysis devoted to rational numbers alone", was that the first known such usage? What was the likely inspiration of Lagrange(and Euler)?
GEP
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When did trigonometry start using negative numbers?
I'm asking this question looking at the unit circle, and thinking that greek mathematicians didn't use negative numbers. Maybe that can give enough insight into what I'm asking?
6
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What is the original source for Einstein's description of entanglement as "Spooky Action at a Distance"?
Try as I may, I cannot find the original source where Einstein described entanglement as "Spooky Action at the Distance." The work "spooky" is not in the 1935 EPR paper, which was written in English and thus there is no issue of translation from…
vy32
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Why did Linnaeus equate the phoenix, the mythical bird, with Phoenix, a palm genus?
I've been reading about the "paradoxa" section of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, where he debunk some of the more far fetched ideas about animals.
Wikipedia includes this translation of what Linnaeus wrote about the Phoenix.
"Species of bird, of…
Jetpack
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When did Dehn start to work on Hilbert's third problem?
According to this wiki article, Dehn solved Hilbert's third problem within a year.
Did Dehn start to work on the third problem after Hilbert's talk? Since Dehn is Hilbert's student, they were likely to know what problems each other had been working…
modnar
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Are there widely accepted math symbols using non-Latin alphabets or characters other than Greek and Hebrew?
We have $\pi$ and $\aleph_0$ borrowed from Greek and Hebrew alphabets. Are there widely accepted math symbols using non-Latin alphabets or characters other than Greek and Hebrew?
A related question on Math.SE: Cyrillic alphabet in math
Wikipedia's…
modnar
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What was the original reason physicists first believed that light must follow a geodesic?
Context: One of the key reasons Einstein first suspected space is curved by mass is due to the falling elevator thought experiment. This experiment implies that mass must curve the path of a light ray. From this, he inferred that space must be…
Rory Cornish
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6
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1 answer
History of "independent and dependent variables"
I have a lot of questions that can be summed up by "whats the history of independent and dependent variables?" Here is a list of those questions:
Where does our conception of independent and dependent variables come from? When did science get a…
Robin
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What is the history behind defining temperature as measure of hotness?
I know that when two bodies of different temperature are kept in contact "heat" flows from hotter body to colder. But how did anyone know that it is the "hotness" that flows, one could have said that the "coldness" flows from colder body to hotter…
PRITIPRIYA DASBEHERA
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What was worldwide supply of disk storage in 1969?
I'd prefer a year-by-year graph, something like (not necessarily the "demand", just "supply")...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/751749/worldwide-data-storage-capacity-and-demand/
Google found me that, which goes back to 2009, but I…
John Forkosh
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6
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Do North Koreans use Latin letters in their equations?
Do North Koreans use Latin (and Greek) letters in their equations?
On the one hand, being such an isolationist country, I wouldn't be surprised if they used the Korean alphabet (조선글) in their equations. On the other hand, the similarly isolationist…
Akiva Weinberger
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