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What was the motive for inventing Gröbner bases?
How did professor Buchberger discover Gröbner (Groebner) bases for polynomial ideals? What was the problem(s) that lead to such a discovery?
Tedebbur
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Did Jacobi invent the Hungarian algorithm for the assignment problem over a century before Kőnig and Egerváry?
Wikipedia says:
In 2006, it was discovered that Carl Gustav Jacobi had solved the assignment problem in the 19th century, and the solution had been published posthumously in 1890 in Latin.
The provided reference gives no support to the…
Anton Petrunin
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Did Renaissance mathematicians once consider themselves inferior to the great ancient mathematicians?
In the book What do you care what other people think?, Feynman talks about how in the 16th century Niccolo Tartaglia discovered a solution to cubic equations. He says while this was not a major discovery, it was a boost to the confidence of…
Steve Sether
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When did the use of Sine and Cosine as functions become mainstream?
In the work of early physicists like Newton, everything is explained in terms of cumbersome (in today's standards) geometry. They don't talk about "cosines" of certain angle, but about proportions between the sides of triangles. But aren't sines and…
Chegon
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Did Cauchy ever deal with double or triple integrals?
Did Cauchy ever deal with double or triple integrals? Did he give rigorous proofs of multivariable integral calculus like what came to be called Stokes's theorem, the divergence theorem, etc.?
Geremia
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Where did the term "set-builder notation" come from?
In math stack exchange I often see notations like $\{x\in\mathbb Q:x^2<2\}$ being called instances of set builder notation. When I went to school we (that is, I, my fellow students, my teachers, and authors of textbooks such as P. Halmos, N.…
kimchi lover
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When was it found that a function could be decomposed as a sum of even and odd functions?
I'm not sure if it's a good question but I was reading about the decomposition of any function, f(x), as a sum of even and odd functions; f(x) is not an even or odd function.
Is it possible to know when this fact (or, theorem?) was discovered and…
PG1995
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Origin of the "law of quadratic reciprocity"
Today, "reciprocity" is the standard mathematical word used for quadratic reciprocity and its generalizations.
I found that the name dates back to no later than 1832, when a paper of Dirichlet (Crelle's Journal vol. 9 p. 379) made reference to the…
echinodermata
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What is the origin of the Chinese Stick Multiplication method?
A while back I came across an interesting method to do multiplication. I don't know what it's called and am interested in when (and who) developed this method.
I don't know if it's a mathematical curiosity or if it was developed in a time and place…
Mayo
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5
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Did the principles of celestial mechanics affect the development of electromagnetism?
Much of the early theoretical work in electricity and magnetism appears to have been the result of applying celestial mechanical principles to electrostatics. Examples include Cavendish's inverse-square law experiment (which had an analogous…
Sam Gallagher
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Difference between Perrin's and J. J. Thomson's experiment
In J. J. Thomson's paper (Phil. Mag. S. 5. Vol. 44. No. 269. Oct. 1897) concerned with cathode rays, Thomson writes, that the experiment by Perrin that supposedly proves that cathode rays are made of negatively charged particles is open to…
Deglupta
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2 answers
Source for Felix Klein quote about curves
Hubbard and Hubbard (in "Vector Calculus...") attribute the following quote to Felix Klein: "Everyone knows what a curve is, until he has studied enough mathematics to become confused through the countless number of possible exceptions."
Does anyone…
Frunobulax
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How did the use of the word "origin" become commonplace in geometry?
My understanding is that in Cartesian geometry, all coordinate axes of an n-dimensional space may intersect at one point. I would like to know how that point--whether (0, 0), (0,0,0), ... -- came to be called "the origin." What else has it been…
bblohowiak
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Who came up with the convolution theorem?
I am looking for the earliest reference which proposed the convolution theorem which is often utilized in signal processing (i.e., convolution becomes multiplication in the Fourier domain).
The Earliest Known Uses of the Word of Mathematics websites…
AChem
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What are the principles of historiography of science?
Is there a consensus amongst historians as to the principles of the historiography of science or as to how to write/create/preserve/record history? If there is, then what are those principles? If there isn't, what are the major positions regarding…
Louis
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